


your sharp and glorious thorn

by arahir



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical/Fantasy, Angst with a Happy Ending, Arranged Marriage, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Protectiveness, Sharing a Bed, and attempted assassination, and there are puppies, haha but not, someone dies... of FUN, they're doing their best
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-28
Updated: 2019-04-01
Packaged: 2019-09-29 08:55:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 38,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17200472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arahir/pseuds/arahir
Summary: To end the war they inherited, Keith marries the King he lead an army against.“You know, we met once,” the king continues, voice closer, and Keith almost turns. They met many times on the field—but then the king clarifies with a single word. “Before.”Before he was a king. Maybe before he was a general. Keith has traced his rise like the growth of a seed he planted in clay and never expected to see again for how poorly he sowed it. None of this would have been possible without Keith—not the war, not a line soldier's battlefield promotion, not the end of it all, tied up so neatly by all Keith’s best mistakes. Not the killing, either. The king is right about that much, at least.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [meoqie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/meoqie/gifts).



> Hi Meoqie! I'm your secret santa! Merry belated Christmas, happy New Year, and I hope you had a lovely holiday! Apologies for posting in two parts; real life obligations kicked my butt and I wanted to give this its full due. Thank you so much for the prompts. They were really inspiring and I hope this is some of what you wanted. You're under no obligation to read more of it than you want to! It was a serious joy just to have a chance to write it <333

The wedding is held at the end of autumn, two weeks after the armistice is signed, three weeks after the ceasefire, and ten years after the start of the war. The king wears robes fine as silk and cut like armor, gold over his shoulders, black on white. It looks woven from metal, heavy as armor, severe for the occasion.

All of it is.

No music plays, no flowers line the halls, but they’re out of season and for a moment Keith wonders why he ever thought it could be otherwise. The vision in his mind was not generous, but the reality of it is harder, darker. The marble walls, lined with soldiers dressed in black, still and silent like figures on chessboard.  Keith is the sole white piece in play. They put him in lace; long sleeves and a high collar, black leather over his legs and feet, all of it fit tight like a second skin over his thinner frame. The red of his cloak is the one piece that stands out, draped across his back and trailing over the stone, a mark of shame that follows him down the long halls—or a mark of pride.

Not his. Pride left him years ago.

Before, in the silence and wait, he tried to imagine a worst case scenario. Maybe a trap, a betrayal, that all of this was to get him away from his people and every agreement would be made null by his blood on the floor of this monochrome palace. Nothing, he realizes, is so bad as the reality. It comes to him in separate moments after the doors open, the dark wood of them gleaming as if freshly polished, so tall they take two guards on each side to push them free from the threshold. They make an audible sound as they part, like air escaping, almost a gasp.

The crowd inside is almost silent. The king's grip on his hand until that point was light and perfunctory, but now his fingers convulse and tighten.

The throne room is done up in banners that look more appropriate for a coronation or some grand funeral. It wouldn’t be Keith’s first. When their losses in battle were too vast to bury and mourn one by one, it was done en masse, and his coronation was much the same: sombre, done out of necessity, done because there was no one better to fill the throne—and no one else left.

They step into the room. It’s colder and he’s suddenly thankful for the fur lining the cloak, though it seemed a ridiculous indulgence when they put it on him. The king draped it around his shoulders and fastened the brooch at the hollow of his throat, gold over white lacing, the head of a lion at roar carved in metal because everything in that city and in that palace has to be _more_.

Keith hasn’t seen gold in years. They traded the last of it for weapons and food, supplies to places that saw too many hard winters in a row. Their city was never sumptuous, but after years of war, it became bare, the bones of the castle picked over a thousand little expenses. The last time Keith saw it was two years past and even his rooms were relegated to a straw mattress. That’s someone else’s responsibility now, he realizes. All those hard decisions, all that heavy weight.

As soon as he says _I do,_ it will be taken from him, along with everything else.

By accident or design, their steps are slow as they walk to the end of the hall and the dais there. Keith is torn between wanting to have it over quickly and trying to prolong it. He's never been one to run from a fight, but this isn't one. Atop the stairs there, a woman is waiting, dressed in gown that looks like it’s made of rose petals, white hair half braided up and back.

She’s beautiful. Certainly, more the bride than Keith. When she sees the two of them, she smiles. Keith thinks it’s meant for the king, but then her eyes shift to him and the smile falters only for a second before it sticks. It's the first of the day. Everything until that moment has been a whirl of new faces and sounds, but once he sees what she's holding, all of it draws to a halt, his nerves crystallizing in his chest.

The crown she’s holding is made to match the king's, but where his is solid with a few black stones, Keith's is spiked and studded with spots of ruby that glitter. It's not gaudy, but it's too fine for him.

“Don’t be scared,” she says to him when they approach, so quiet he reads it on her lips more than he hears it.

As if it’s a choice. She sets the circle of gold and stone on his head with a touch so gentle he almost doesn’t feel it at all. Still, the weight of it pushes his hair into his eyes. They tried for the better part of an hour to subdue it before the ceremony without much luck—a decade of cutting it with his knife in half-lit tents, fingers shaking from being tensed around reins or the hilt of a sword all day, hasn't helped it.

Keith reaches up to right it, but the king beats him to it. His touch is unexpected. He's pulled his gloves off; bare, calloused skin draws across his forehead along the rim of the metal circlet, pushing it up, and then he pushes the stray hair back, tucks it beneath with nimble fingers.

His face is visible. For the first time in their acquaintanceship, he’s unobscured by rain or mud any of the distractions of war. His jaw is square and his eyes are clear and Keith wishes he knew enough to know what kind of a face it is, where to order it, to decide if it's handsome or not or something else entirely.

It's not as though it matters now, but he wishes he knew.

The woman is speaking now, asking a question, but he can't look away from those eyes. The king’s voice is so soft when he answers her that Keith thinks she'll make him repeat it. It doesn't count if no one hears, but then, Keith heard. Maybe that's enough.

The next question is for him. He can feel the weight of every stare, the pull of the cloak over his chest, the lace at his neck, almost choking when he tries to speak. The words almost freeze on his tongue, but he surprises himself. They fall out of his mouth, ringing loud in the wide hall.

“I do.”

The king's eyes widen a fraction, almost in surprise. He shouldn't be. This was his design, right from the start, from the moment he pinned Keith in the mud in that last battle, his sword to Keith's throat, his eyes like a fire and wider then than they are now. He wanted this.

Somehow, having the words out is a relief.

The rings come next; the king fits Keith's over his finger, a mean feat one-handed but he’s skilled. The size of his hand makes Keith's look delicate by comparison, though it's not. His own fingers are nicks and scars, some fresh enough that they're still ruddy.

It's not pretty enough for a ring like that. Pure gold, again, and heavy. Keith forgets the room for a moment once the king lets go and flexes his fingers, not admiring as much as assessing. It'll take time to get used to the weight. Maybe it’ll throw off his swing in a fight, he thinks, before he remembers the first condition of his residence, of his new crown, of that ring, is that he never touch another blade.

When he returns the favor, he does it as gently as he can, sliding the band over the king's finger with his clumsy touch. He can't look up. If he looks up, his nerves might fail.

Later, he won't remember what the woman says—not any of it, but that last breath most of all, because of what follows it. She speaks and Keith knows what comes next. Somehow, when they told him this was what the alliance would be sealed with and _this_ was what he would have to do, it seemed the easiest part.

If he can kill a man, he can kiss one.

The king falters. Keith takes the initiative and leans up. He presses his lips to the taller man’s, soft to his rough, only because they made Keith bathe in a hundred flowery concoctions before they let him near a bit of lace. The king jerks and takes the smallest breath before Keith pulls away.

When he opens his eyes, the king's face is closer than before, and his eyes are darting across Keith's, searching for something, but then they part and applause rings out. Not polite but not raucous—only thunderous and loud, a collective breath released, as if no one wasn't sure what was left of Keith's army wasn't going to batter down the gates at the last second. Keith wasn't sure they wouldn't, orders be damned. Relief and disappointment chase the thought at the same speed—but then a hand is in his once again and this time there's a cool point of metal that fits against his fingers.

It's real. There is no rescue, per his word. Nothing to be rescued from.

As they walk back down the hall, applause still pounding around them, he lets himself look at the group at the front for the first time. He wonders if Kolivan is proud. He wonders if Kolivan hates him for this. His mother sits on the closer side. No one in the castle knows that's what she is and they'd prefer to keep it that way, so he can't run to her and push his face to her chest like he did when he was a child.

In the king's robes, wearing his ring, holding his hand, he can barely look at her. As he steps by her expression works into half a smile, somehow just what he needed. He tries his best to return it, but then they're stepping past the last he'll see of them that day.

There's music now, as triumphant as the applause, and the tittering of the crowd. It's somehow less intimidating for the way he can't pick a single point to focus on. Every eye in the throne room is on him. A sea of faces, a thousand eyes, all for him, and not one smile. He expected to be the exception in that, but no. They are far past formalities and pretty words.

If he pretends it's a battle, courage will find him faster.

Outside the great doors, more are waiting for him. The king pauses there at the top of the steps, still arm in arm with Keith, and then he starts to speak. His words are simple and more beautiful for it. Loss he talks about the most, and new beginnings, and, very briefly, love. The union is more than the sum of its parts, he says.

Together, they will build something greater.

As Keith looks out across the crowds, a stillness settles over him and withers in his chest. He can't make anything in this place. He can't build on nothing, out of nothing, and that's all that's left to him. Nothing, and the heat of the hand clasping his own.

 

* * *

 

“We called you the Red Paladin.”

Keith stiffens, his grip on the back of the chair going so tight he worries it will crack the wood, tear the fine embroidery on the cloth of it. It’s woven of greens and yellows, some summer scene drawn in stitches so fine as to be invisible, flowers and deer running rampant across a field.

He doesn’t reply.

 _Why_ , he could ask, but he knows the answer, can still taste it on the back of his tongue, sharper than metal. Once, he heard a man spit the words at him from the dirt and he knew then what it meant. Red as the blood he spilled. So much that it coated his armor and skin at the end of some battles.

Snow crusts the world outside the window, the wild gardens made uniform and monochrome. They cleared it off the street for the wedding, but he wouldn’t have known the difference by the way the whole city is done up in white. It's early this year, or so he heard. Outside, the last leaves were still turning before the freeze; they bleed red against the snow when they fall, weighed down by the ice. His country has no snow. It has no ice. He learned both in war, and it was hard. It bogged their horses down, made his fingers crack and bleed if he didn’t remember his gloves, but he learned it.

That war taught him all things—all things, except the obvious. This conversation isn’t one he knows how to have, and It’s his fault they’re having it. A snappish comment in the wrong place, at the wrong time. He can't fit in this place, can't mold himself to this life. People hate him. Maybe the king does too, even if he doesn’t know it yet. His patience with Keith will wither and die one day, and then Keith will make his decisions and deal with his agonies.

“I know,” Keith murmurs after another moment of watching the leaves break and fall.

They had rude names for the king, too. Keith didn’t participate, but it wasn’t something he could order the men to stop. It was dangerous to underestimate a man who could win a war one handed—and he was winning. The king was winning full stop, until that last fight.

“You killed—so many. So many.” _You_ , he says, and means. Not Keith’s men, but Keith. He was always a force to be reckoned with. It made the fighting too easy. Soldiers ran from him on the field after he won his reputation. It doesn’t sound like an accusation though—more marveling.

“I know,” Keith repeats, and this time there’s a bite to it. _But you killed more,_ he doesn't say. The king was never the singular force that Keith was, but his armies decimated more than a hundred men like Keith could have.

“You know, we met once,” the king continues, voice closer, and Keith almost turns. They met many times on the field—but then the king clarifies with a single word. “Before.”

Before he was a king. Maybe before he was a general. Keith has traced his rise like the growth of a seed he planted in clay and never expected to see again for how poorly he sowed it. In many ways, none of this would have been possible without Keith—not the war, not a line soldier's battlefield promotion, not the end of it all, tied up so neatly by all Keith’s best mistakes. Not the killing, either. The king is right about that much, at least.

They won't let him near a sword—but half his best kills were improvised in desperation. If he wanted the king dead, there are a dozen and more items in reach that could do the trick. The chair under his hands—or he could use his bare hands. He doesn't want to. Of the two of them, the king is far and last on Keith's list of angers and regrets.

Keith closes his eyes and tries to remember their first meeting. Maybe some post-battle lull, when Keith was still young. He half-turns. The room is lit stark white by afternoon light reflecting off snow; it bounces off the king’s pale hair, lights his eyes bright. Maybe. Maybe Keith recognizes him from those early days.

“You could have killed me,” the king says. “You had me dead to rights—but I guess I wasn’t worth it. How old were you then?”

Keith takes a breath. “When?”

“Six winters past.”

He does a quick math. “...Eighteen, maybe. Seventeen.” There’s no reason to lie. He was fourteen when the war started and it didn't take long to overrun him. His participation wasn't optional. No one asked him to serve, but no one had to; it was implicit, and duty and desire have always been two heads on the same beast dogging his heels.

It's almost near sunset. It'll slide behind the hills to the west of the city, low and rolling. In his mind he can see a map of them, the roads snaking to the main gates, the river and the forest and then endless valleys and mountains and plains, until the desert. Until home.

He can't miss it, because once he starts, it won't end.

The king huffs. “Eighteen,” he says, like it's a full thought, and then his steps draw away.

The ceremony ended hours ago. In better times, under better circumstances, the party might have lasted days, but this isn't the occasion for it. They shared a meal of bread and soup that reminded Keith of sitting somewhere quiet in the wild and letting a fire work the chill out of his bones. Now that the excitement's passed, his body wants to find the nearest horizontal surface and pass out.

“Where should I sleep?”

When he turns, the king is staring at him from the door. Not the one they entered by, but a second double set of doors he thought were a part of an elaborate closet on the other side of the room. The king opens them, gestures inside, and Keith realizes he's a fool. It's a bedroom, and this isn't a nice room for looking out at the gardens and escaping ceremonies; these are the king's rooms.

The king motions to the bed. Outside the sun has started to set in earnest. In an hour, it'll be dead dark outside and cold. There's already a fire going in the hearth on the other side of the room. Keith's body bends toward it.

“This wasn't part of the agreement,” he hears himself say. He wonders if he'll be laughed at, if maybe this was always implied and everyone but him knew all along.

The king frowns. “Keith, what—”

“Don't call me that.”

His mouth closes and then he steps toward Keith, hand raised like Keith is an animal ready to bolt in terror. It's what he feels like. He can kill a man and a kiss was easy, but this—

“I'm not going to touch you. No one is going to touch you.” Keith blinks, tries to process, realizes his mind is stuttering at last because all he has energy left for is sleeping and there's a bed right there, but he's scared of this place and scared of these people like he never was in war.

“This is about unity. If people see us sleeping on opposite sides of the castle, meeting once a day, what's the point?”

“But sharing...” Keith half whispers.

“Look. I’m tired.” He puts his hand to forehead and gusts out a breath. “This is the best bed in the castle. Take half or don't, but I'm going to sleep, and you're welcome to…” he pinches at his brow, “...join me.”

The implication is still there. It's slithered into Keith's mind and coiled around his nerves. They’ve spent hours together, mostly in silence, after years of distant presence. This isn’t a thing he wants—not a thing he thought anyone would want from him, of all people, but the man is already turned away, sloughing off his robes in a careless pile by the great bed. His movements are curt and—weary.

He's human and he's tired. Keith knew that, once. Keith has fought him to exhaustion, seen him at the breaking, but this is different.

When he's done, he turns back to Keith and sighs. “I’m not going to touch you,” he repeats, and then works off the decorative vambrace at his wrist with his teeth. It falls away with a quiet thump, and the only glint left on his hand is the ring.

His tunic lands on the floor with the rest, his scar laden back on full display in the fire light. True to his word, he slides into bed then, with less grace and more of a fall.

It’s nothing. A bed. A warm bed, at the end of a long fight. A fight he lost, but he didn’t expect to live through that. In some ways, he hates that he did, but he's too tired to keep fighting this.

Keith discards his clothes, one piece at a time, almost rips the lace as he pulls it off. Servants helped him get it on, but it’s always easier to take a thing apart than it is to put it together. He almost discards the cloak with the rest, but it’s too fine. The red cloth is thick and fine and for more than show—he would have given his sword for one like it in the field, some days. Some nights. He hangs it over the back of one of the embroidered chairs and pads back to the bed.

It’s wider than any bed Keith has ever slept in. He perches on the edge of it anyway, curled on his side, as if the body at his back is over-sized and will reach him, even there.

Sleep eludes him for minutes; when the king’s voice reaches him, it’s soft and unexpected.

“Are you really scared of me?”

He sounds young when he asks it.

“No, your highness.” The words don’t come out as he means them—less respectful, more sarcastic. _Your highness._

“My name is Shiro,” the king says from the other side of the bed, weary but kind, and then he rolls over and Keith is left to the quiet of the fire burning across the room. _Shiro._ He knew it was the king’s name, in part at least. But shortened, it sounds disarming. It sounds like a name for a friend, not a lord—a name he would yell across the camp at the end of a long day.

He mouths it in the dark. Curled under soft sheets on a soft bed, it feels like a night prayer. Not a habit he was given to in the field, but the others were. At night he could hear them all around the camp.

The calm after everything, at last, comical almost. At rest, finally, in the bed of the man who lead an army against him.

 

* * *

 

The diplomatic contingent leaves the next day and takes the Blades with it. Keith bids them farewell at the palace gates, a double guard of soldiers in white standing at his back.

The second snow is beginning to fall. If they don't leave that night, they'll be stuck, and that's not a fate Keith would wish on anyone. It's a long road home. No one has any smart words for him, for once. The mood is so morose he carries it with him all the rest of the day, alongside the knife Krolia slips him in a hug. _In case you need it._

A knife that can change to a sword in a thought. One more oddity, one more thing that set his people apart. It was a manifestation of will in battle, but here it's useless.

Maybe she means it to be an exercise in patience to keep it hidden and dull and almost harmless, just like him. Small though it is, he's not supposed to have it. That was a condition of his residence and one Shiro fought. In the end, it was Keith's choice and not worth the struggle. If Shiro’s generals wanted to think he was toothless without a weapon, they could. It was symbolic disarmament, as all of it was.

His people got their autonomy, for freedom from a war they didn't start but couldn't win, and Shiro's generals got collateral.

Keith is the thing they tamed in war. They could say it all the day long and it wouldn’t make it any more true.

After the wedding, he's left in a kind of stasis. There's nothing to fight and nothing else to do because if he's not allowed to touch a sword, he's certainly not next on the list for any strategy meeting or diplomatic talks. Those were done before he got there and

The castle is vast. He tries to lose himself in it. Two days in a row he wastes time from breakfast to dinner in a room of instruments he doesn’t know how to play, plucking strings in the quiet, testing the keys of an old piano. The room has a balcony that faces the forest and a set of fine chairs to sit in and stare out, which is what he assumes people do in chairs like that.

Free time it a new concept. It's hard to pick up.

No one bothers him in that room. No one bothers him anyway, but he doesn't know if that's by accident or on purpose—if they were asked to leave him be, or if he's so hated that they do it willingly. The two guards that follow him around are younger, but not by much. Keith hasn't tried making conversation yet. They put off an aura of boredom and maybe if Keith weren't mucked up in a dozen worse emotions, he'd be there too.

In the evenings, he eats with Shiro and then they sleep, almost always in silence, but sometimes he asks Keith about his day or how he's getting along and Keith tries to be honest in return.

On the third day, the music room loses his interest. His body is over-full of energy and even sitting around brooding gets tiresome.

When he steps outside, both the guards stand to attention, but not fast enough to hide the cloth gameboard set up on the floor, covered in colored stones. “At least someone's having fun,” he mutters.

They both go wide-eyed. “Can we help you, sir?” the big one asks. The other looks at Keith with narrowed eyes, but doesn't speak.

“Is there a training ground?”

The guards frowns. “It's down past the stables, but it's mostly mud this time of year.”

He doesn't know where the stables are. Most of the palace's layout is a mystery—it's this that distinguishes it from a mere castle in his mind. A castle has walls and corridors and a courtyard, maybe. This place has _verandas_ and _wings_ and _gardens_.

“Can you take me?”

The guards exchange a glance. Keith hasn't figured out if they're there to guard him or to guard everyone else, but it's worth asking. “Maybe?” asks the tall one, as if Keith might know.

The skinny one looks him up and down. “No way. He's planning something.”

That answers one question. Keith shrugs and walks back into the music room, and this time he closes the door behind him. There's a small balcony under the window that's probably meant to be decorative, but the window has a latch and that's as good as an invitation. He works it open, slips outside, and sure enough there's a whole line of similar balconies down the wall, carved out of pale stone.

 

* * *

 

A half hour later he's blessedly free from his entourage, but no closer to finding a way outside that doesn't involve more guards than he's willing to deal with—or a thirty foot jump.

All he needs is an inconspicuous hall that can lead him to an inconspicuous door and an inconspicuous path down to the stables, which are still a mystery, but he can suss it out.

Four doors in a row yield nothing but empty rooms that look like they might be for Functions, none of which he's been subjected to yet. It's not as though he can't walk out the front door, but that would be awkward, and Keith is enough of that on his own. Every time he imagines it, the image is chased by some harried looking guard telling Shiro and his gaze going concerned and disappointed.

The fifth door is a mistake.

The exact thing he was trying to avoid, writ large, almost as if summoned from his imagination: Shiro at a table, papers stacked in front of him, another dozen people seated around him.

“K—Keith?” he stutters and stands. The guards go tense and then loose again at Shiro's word, but the other faces at the table aren't so kind—and these are ones Keith recognizes.

Generals. Iverson and Holt, some other ministers of war he only knows by a moniker and a crest. Shiro's choice in how to end this war wasn't popular. In many ways, it was the worst of all options. Looking at their faces now, at the unbridled hate on some of them, Keith wonders what it cost. He wonders how much Shiro had to concede to keep him alive.

“I got lost,” Keith says. “Sorry.”

He closes the door as quietly as he can and then turns and walks away as fast as he can without running. The jump off the balcony might be worth it. A busted ankle would be better than going through that again.

He's to the end of the corridor before there’s the sound of a door opening and closing behind him, and a, “Wait!” Shiro's voice is the most familiar sound in the castle, which is the only reason he listens and turns. Sure enough, he's running up the hallway, guard in tow. “Where are Lance and Hunk?” he asks when he catches up.

Keith is horrible at excuses so he shrugs and doesn't fight the hint of a smile that sneaks across his face when he imagines them still outside that door, playing marbles.

Shiro smiles in return. “Yeah, that's fair. Where are you going?”

Not a threat so much as an offer. Keith winces. “The stable?”

Shiro glances back to the door but not with longing and steps up beside Keith and starts walking. “Come on. I can show you.”

“But—”

“Honestly, I don't mind.” He doesn't look like he doesn't mind. He looks on the polite side of thrilled.

Keith tries to think of a reason to refuse, but can't, so he nods and Shiro steps up next to him, matching his pace. Their legs are the same length; he noticed it in the field, the first time they skirmished. A little slower than Keith, but not by much, and a longer reach to make up for it. All that power.

He tries to be subtle about glancing over. The cloak hides his shoulders, but not how wide they are, and Keith can feel his weight when he settles into bed at night.  Keith isn't abnormally small, but Shiro might be abnormally large. It's unfair.

“What?”

Keith glances up at him. “What?”

“What's that sour look for?”

There's no honest way to reply that won't damn him, one way or another. He shakes his head. A pair of girls in some kind of uniform see them walking by and push each other back into the door they were stepping out of, hands over their mouths, eyes sparkling. Keith wonders what kind of pair they cut. A mismatched one, at any rate. Shiro is built for audiences and speeches, built for kingship, built for ruling. Keith is built for the fight.

Shiro smiles at the girls as they pass and something sour slips into Keith's mood.

That, somehow, had never occurred to him, but now he realizes he's an idiot. They sleep in the same bed every night, and he wants to believe he would know, but there are a thousand places and ways to conduct illicit business in a palace like this.

Keith snorts at the thought—as if he would need to. Shiro could kick him out of their rooms for it and who would mind?

“I don't like women,” Shiro says softly.

Keith looks up at him in horror. “That's not—I don't care about that,” he mutters, but then as if being pulled by a string his gaze draws around to the guards behind them, both men more than boys, both more the soldier than Keith—

Shiro stops and tugs on his arm. “I'm not going to sleep with anyone else.”

Keith chokes on his words because the wording is innocent but not and and he knows how his face must look because Shiro eyebrows rise and then he's smiling. Keith pulls his arm away, stepping forward at double-pace.

“Keith. _Keith_ , I didn't mean it like that.” He catches up at the end of the hallway. Part of him still bristles at the use of his name, but it’s better coming from him than anyone else in this place and better than the alternative. Keith makes a fast turn left, but Shiro stops him again with an amused, “Other way.”

The walk is long and twisting. He loses track of turns and then stops trying. It's been two winters since he was home and no matter where they he was in the castle, he could find a door out in three turns and a hundred steps. The guards tail ten steps behind them the entire way and again, Keith's not sure of their purpose. The closer they get, a kind of giddiness rises in him at the prospect of freedom, and then one last turn and the door is there, like an afterthought.

The guards step forward to open it and the cold leaps in and slaps Keith in the face. Most a week in the warmth shouldn't be enough to kill years of dealing with the ice and wet. They step outside, into snow a foot deep. Keith takes the deepest breath he can, blinking at the sun glaring off the snow. He must make a sound because Shiro glances over at him and then does a double-take. “What are you wearing?”

Keith looks down at himself. Soft boots, leather vest over cotton, fitted pants. “What?”

“You're going to freeze.”

Keith rolls his eyes. “It's not that cold.” But Shiro is already swinging the cloak off his shoulders and draping it around his shoulders. “Thanks, mom,” Keith mutters.

Shiro jerks back, like Keith's words have jumped out of his mouth and slapped Shiro in the face.

“I'm not your mother,” he says darkly, “or your father. And I don't want to sleep next to a ball of snot for the next week.” He gathers the edges of the cloak in his hand, pulling it tight around Keith's shoulders, and presses the wad of cloth to Keith's chest. “So stay warm.”

An order, maybe, or a plea. He’s right—he's not a parent. Keith watches him as he steps away and then follows, hand keeping the cloak wrapped tight, even though he knows he must look ridiculous in it. It trails in the snow around Keith's feet. Not a parent, and this is for the rest of his life. This day in and day out of castle life, this loneliness. He pauses a moment, blinking the sting of cold out of his eyes to watch Shiro ahead of him.

He has only one thing in the world, and that’s it—square shoulders, a kind smile,  For the first moment, it seems like something worth having.

 

* * *

 

It's only once they're at the stables that he remembers his careful omission. The training ground is visible beyond, a few brave or unlucky souls, halfheartedly swinging at each other in the mud. He can find it again on his own.

Shiro directs them into the long, stone building that barely smells of horse. The stables at home are the size of gatekeeper's watch house and every animal not in use is put out in the pasture. The weather doesn't get bad enough to warrant this. The place is massive. They leave the guards at the door. Keith feels like he's in a trance, walking down the hard packed path between the endless line of stalls. Shiro stops them at the end of a row and a familiar face leans out over the wood panel gate, black as soot with a tight-cropped mane, so slick the horse looks like he’s made of oil.

This horse, Keith knows. They've ridden together twice. Shiro says something soft to him and then half-turns to Keith. “This is Black,” he says, pride sitting on his brow.

Keith says nothing, but holds out a palm to the horse's velvet nose and doesn't fight the smile that steals across his face at the soft tickle of whiskers. Animals are easier than people. In war, he didn't have time to get attached to any horse. The last one was red and he sent her home with Krolia and the other Blades on that final day. It seemed unfair that anything he loved should have to share a life here in the cold, without friends.

“You're good with him. You know, you can ride any of them. Any time.”

The offer is a surprise, and then an ache. Keith can't look at him.

On his first day, he wanted to ride. He wanted to hop on the nearest spare mount and slip up into the hills, into the wild, sleep under a tree on hard ground the way he was used to, and it wasn't for love of that life but for the familiarity and the freedom.

“You've been quiet,” Shiro says when Keith doesn't answer. His hand slips over the horse's cheek and then the long bone of his jaw, stopping just an inch short of Keith's fingers. “Do you want anything?”

His tone speaks of regret, as if he knows as he asks it that Keith won't give an honest answer and if he could have asked a better question, he would have.  Keith shakes his head and spares them both the lie.

He wants a hundred things. This place behind him, a road ahead. The touch of sun on his shoulders, sand under his feet, wind in his hair. His mother and Kolivan. Or maybe just a good fight—to be useful, to wake up sore, to do something. Anything.

Shiro pulls his hand away, brushing Keith's as he moves.

“Here,” he says and steps away, motioning two stalls down. Keith pats Black goodbye and follows. The stall Shiro takes them to is horse-less, but as soon as Shiro unlatches the gate, he sees why.

There's a dog resting in the hay and five puppies beside it. Almost in a trance, Keith steps inside and bends. “How old are they?”

Shiro laughs. “I don't know. Too young to leave their mother, but if you want one when they're older, they're all yours.”

Three are grey and two are black, the same as the mother they're nestled against. War taught him how to let go of good things. Once learned, distance is a habit hard to break. Horses die in battle, and soldiers, too. Regris was his youngest commander. An arrow took his horse out from under him in a charge and he was trampled by the rest. That was a month before the treaty.

Keith reaches out and runs his fingers over the back of one of the black ones. It makes a tiny sound and pushes against him.

For a single, horrible moment, his throat gets tight, and his eyes start to sting, but then Shiro kneels in the hay next to him and reaches out his hand. The motion forces him to lean on Keith's shoulder or overbalance, his breath in Keith's ear. They've been so close only twice.

“Everything is yours,” Shiro murmurs. “Everything in the country. That's the deal we made.”

“As long as it’s not sharp.”

Shiro's hand stills and his breath freezes. “You know that wasn't my choice.”

Keith can't reply. It wasn't Shiro's. It was his. But a signature is easy. His is stark, unbeautiful, quick, and all it took to sign his life away. Not a regret, not yet, but still painful.

“Do you ever miss it?” Keith whispers.

“Miss what?”

“The fight.”

Shiro takes a long time to answer, and when he does, his voice is rough. “Yes. But not as much as I hated it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/arahir), [tumblr](http://arahir.tumblr.com/), and [pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.io/arahir).


	2. Chapter 2

The party is expected, but it still takes him by surprise. A month after the wedding, he's settled into his new home like a cat in water.

Even if he never enjoys it, he'll survive. He can adapt to anything. Sometimes he torments Hunk and Lance by asking questions he already knows the answer to, strumming a lyre he doesn’t know to play, or finding new and inventive ways to get away from them. He oversees the naming of the puppies, which isn't exactly as compelling as ordering a battalion to battle, but maybe is better in different ways. Shiro says he can keep one in their rooms. Actually, he said he could keep all of them, but someone has to be the voice of reason. One will do.

He had a letter from home about the army's return, the list of casualties pared down to spare him pain, but he's good at reading between those lines. Now it's time to rebuild, lick wounds, settle down, thank every bit of luck that there's anything left, and hope luck doesn't fail, too. Shiro sent supplies, and engineers to rebuild bridges and roads lost to the fighting, food in lieu of a year's wasted crops. Maybe it's a lie. Hopefully not.

Probably not, judging by the look on Iverson's face when Shiro told Keith the good news. It's not that Iverson is cruel; he wants what Keith would want in his place: security and enough food for his own men before seeing it shipped off to the people that were trying to kill his a month back.

Keith wonders when Shiro will let him visit, knows in his heart if he asked it would be tomorrow, but his advisors would hate it. Maybe he would let Keith go alone. Suddenly, he's not sure if he would want to.

The image of Shiro alone in their bed is more painful than it has a right to be. His mind inserts a buxom servant in Keith's place, and then a stubbled guardsman, before he becomes ashamed of himself and throws a hand over his eyes. He sinks closer to Shiro in bed, but doesn't touch. Touch is too far and too much. He wants to not be stabbed in the night, he wants for his people to have a winter without desperation, and he wants to live.

He has all of that here. It's a life. Maybe not the one he dreamed of, but then, he never took the time try.

It’s the dead of winter when the first gala comes. Shiro calls it a gala, though it seems more like a party, and Keith wouldn’t know the difference anyway.

They decide to hold it on the solstice. They—not Keith. No one asks him and he wouldn't have had an opinion if they did, except that gathering people together for the express purpose of pretending to smile at each other is stupid at best and a total waste of time in all other ways.

“Do I have to wear lace again?” Keith asks from his side of the room. He expected servants to dress him after the experience of the wedding that’s still a amorphous mass of faces and people in his mind, but no one offers and he doesn’t ask.

Shiro laughs. “Only if you want to.”

He didn’t mind it so much, but it was too delicate for him and the entire day he felt like he was going to tear it if he moved too fast. Instead he chooses a charcoal get up that seems simple enough and functional. All his old clothes are gone, but the ones he rode into the city in were mostly mud at that point anyway. It’s not a loss. He does wear the red cape without needing to be asked, and he's sure he doesn't imagine the approval in Shiro's gaze when he steps out of their room. The knife he brings, too. He keeps it strapped high on his thigh where the long hem of the long jacket will keep it secret. No point in having it if he's not ready to use it.

The walk down the halls feels like he’s going to the gallows. Shiro finally stops them and turns to him.

“Are you scared of them?” The gala, he means, and all the people there.

Keith snorts. “No.”

“You’re making me nervous. You’re making _them_ nervous,” he says, gesturing to their guards. All four of them have shed their usual armor, though they still have swords at their sides. He sees Shiro’s point—there’s sweat on Hunk’s temple and the new woman looks like she’s seen a ghost and is still seeing a ghost. If they’re nervous, Keith privately thinks it’s because they know this is going to be as big of a disaster as Keith is sure he’ll make it, by pure accident. “If you don’t want to go, we can arrange that. No one is forcing you.”

His voice is tight. This is the first party post-war. This is Keith’s first public appearance post-wedding and post-accidentally entering a meeting he wasn’t invited to. “Is there going to be dancing?” he asks.

The thought is ridiculous but that’s what his mind seizes on. Maybe Shiro has a point, maybe he is nervous, because now he can feel himself sweating, too. It’s not that he can’t dance. He doesn’t know if he can. He’s never tried. They don’t have parties at home. Instead they have feasts, and the only thing you have to do is eat and drink and maybe sing if someone decides to get on a table.  

Shiro puts a hand on his shoulder. “There’s no dancing.”

Keith takes a breath, nods. “Okay.”

“I can’t dance either,” Shiro admits. That’s a lie if Keith’s ever heard one, but then one of Shiro’s guards snorts and Shiro tilts his head at the man. “Do you remember—”

“Yes. You almost took out the whole table. And that was when you had two arms. _And_ Allura helping.” They laugh together. The image of it is enough to make Keith smile. The thought of Shiro losing his footing is silly enough—he’s an incredible fighter, but maybe he’s not the only one out of place here.

Some of the tightness in Keith’s shoulders starts to ease. Ridiculous to be scared of this when he’s survived a war and a wedding both.

 

* * *

 

 

“Just stay close,” Shiro murmurs as the grand doors open before them.

Everyone else is already in attendance. Keith has faced armies large enough to fill that entire hall five times over, but still it’s this that makes his blood run cold and his heart stop in his chest.

Shiro brushes his hand with the back of his own. Not an accident but an offer and one Keith wants to take, with a desperation that shocks himself. Instead he balls his fists as if there's a hilt in each hand and the first rule he learned in training was to never lose his grip. Shiro withdraws the offer after a moment.

Keith chances a glance at his face out of the corner of his eye. The smile is there still, as constant as the emblem over his chest. Keith wonders how many people have seen him without it. He wonders how many have seen him with blood on his teeth and sweat in his eyes, mud splattered and gasping for breath. Maybe that's for Keith alone.

He can't decide if he likes the thought more than he hates it.

The room smells like good food and spilled wine. It’s heaped on tables, in excess, an indulgence unimaginable at first glance. His dinners in the palace have been simple: fresh bread, seared meat, roasted vegetables at an undecorated table, two chairs pulled up one to a side. Nothing like this. He realizes in a breath that it was by intent, something staged just for him.

Four cakes, whole fish baked and set out on plates, endless platters of little pies and shelled eggs and sliced meats. Most of it he can’t identify. It won’t get eaten. He wonders if the servants will get to eat what’s left or if it will be tossed aside or given to the dogs and pigs.

Any one table is more food than he saw in a month during the war. They survived on nothing, on scraps. It was a choice to feed the horses or the men some days. He wonders now if they had a banquet tent in the king’s camp. Plates and plates for them to feast on after they were done with their killing, to eat their fill and sleep long and hard and come back to the fight when they were bored of resting. If there was, Keith never saw it, but that’s not where he spent his time when he was sequestered there.

Shiro reaches out again and this time he takes Keith’s hand and tugs him forward. Keith realizes he’s been staring at the food while everyone has been staring at him.

More than anything, he wants to pull his hand away. Instead, he squeezes back, uses the touch as a brace, and steps into the room.

Conversation resumes around them, whisper by whisper, like the sound of a soft wind through a forest, becoming a gale. A sound that used to herald a storm and time to settle down and make camp. He would be a fool to lead a troop through that. He's a fool for being here, now, but they’re both a little bit foolish. That’s what made them a match—the only thing, that made them a match.

Shiro's hand releases his after a moment, but it doesn't go far. His touch slips down to Keith's hip, along the belts wrapped there, to the low of his back where they cross, as near to bare skin as anything on that outfit will get.

His hand sits there as if it's been there a hundred times. Keith wonders if anyone will notice. He wonders if that’s the intent.

The first group they go to is standing below a great window, glittering with frost against the black of the early night outside. Keith recognizes one of them at least: the woman with white hair. Tonight she's decked head to toe in sapphire and midnight blue, so diaphanous she looks like she's been caught up in a wisp of storm cloud. She smiles as they approach. “You two make quite the pair.”

Keith is nothing compared to her. Nothing compared to Shiro. It doesn’t sound like an insult, but Keith still tenses until Shiro pulls him forward.

“This is Allura,” Shiro tells him.

Allura. The name sounds familiar. It’s probably not the first time someone has had to tell him. Polite of Shiro to do it again without making Keith suffer through the conversation first.

Shiro’s tone is fond when he says the name. It occurs to Keith for the first time—Shiro must have been betrothed before this slapdash union. Keith wasn’t. No one wants to hitch themself to a dying horse, but Shiro was something different and he and Allura are a perfect match with their pale hair and perfect posture and beauty. They match this palace and the snow outside, the ice on the windows.

“I hope you’re settling in well,” she adds when Keith forgets he’s supposed to say something. She elbows the man next to her, who elbows the blonde woman next to him, and they both smile, too. Their expressions are less genuine and more like the hideous smiles on the oldest portraits in the throne room, the ones that make it look as though the painter had never seen a real person or animal and was going off someone’s poor descriptions.

He’s not. His best days are when he can convince someone to take him outside. Shiro offered to take him on a ride outside the walls, outside the city, even, but Keith is starting to realize that Shiro’s blind spot for him is wider than it should be. It’ll give his advisors a conniption if they find out.

He nods and then realizes that's rude and follows it with, “Yeah. Thank you,” which isn’t more polite.

Allura’s smile doesn't falter, despite his rough edges. “Good. If you ever need anything, let me know. Coran and Romelle—” she motions to her companions, ”—would be happy to help, too.” Her tone suggests that if they don’t have a choice in the matter.

“Thank you,” he repeats, softer, and hopes the words come across genuine.

Shiro drags him away after another minute of agonizing small talk. After Coran, Romelle, and Allura, there’s Iverson along with Holt and woman in stunning green who both wave at one of Shiro’s guards until the blond man blushes and hides behind a table with a tall cake. Next, Shiro leads him to a group of diplomats from countries Keith has never heard of, all of whom stare at him like he’s a firecracker with a lit fuse. Then there are off-duty guards, more diplomats, and at that point Keith’s head is spinning from the wine someone shoves into his hand. He knows already he won’t remember most of the names and faces.

Keith has to hold Shiro’s wine for him because Shiro refuses to move his hand from the small of Keith’s back. He thinks it’s Shiro’s way of keeping him in line until he realizes Shiro is almost as uncomfortable as Keith is. It’s a ground for both of them.

Of course, Shiro saves the best for last.

The woman he leads them to is the clear lead of her little group. She’s dressed in a grey that matches her hair, beautiful in its way. Her arms are folded before they get close.

“Admiral Sanda,” Shiro says when they approach. “How are you?”

She doesn’t reply. Shiro’s country is has ports, has an ocean—unlike Keith’s. The front was always landlocked. Now her unfamiliarity and the tight draw of her lips makes sense. Frustrating, to watch a war unfold that her world-class fleet could do nothing about. She eyes Keith, from his boots to his crownless head. Jewelry seemed like overkill and it’s not as though Shiro’s wearing his. The boots, at least, are fresh.

“He cleans up well,” the woman says softly. “I suppose that's your doing.”

Her words settle over them, heavy with more meaning and implication than Keith can begin to dig his way out of. Sometimes ignorance is the best defense; he has no notion what she's trying to get at, but Shiro must. Nothing about the change in him is obvious in that moment—Keith feels it more than he sees it, and then Shiro says faux-airy in a tone to match hers, “No. You should have seen what I was going to wear before he put his foot down.”

The words are very fond, very intimate, and when Keith looks up, he's wearing his usual vague smile—but now it reaches his eyes. A man that can smile while he lies is dangerous.

“And here I thought it would be like keeping a pet cat,” the woman replies.

Now, her voice drips with a different implication, and this one Keith reads well enough. A blush tries to rise in his cheeks. Nothing he can think of to say will bite the way he wants it to. He's good at straight forward action, at honesty, at war, but this is a different kind of battle and far more tedious. Far harder to win.

Shiro lets it stand, only shifting to reassert his touch as the small of Keith's back, without shame. Maybe that was always the difference between them: Shiro knows how to pick his battles, and Keith picks all of them.

In this moment though, he's weaponless, without a tactic, without any sound plan. He thinks about flipping her drink out of her hand, or of going full on and flipping the table next to her. It would make an impression at least. He glances back up at Shiro, and there over his collar is a red mark Keith knows he got from their last walk in the garden, from a low-hanging winter rose the groundskeeper missed.

Keith reaches up and pulls at Shiro’s half-high collar, setting it straight in a way that only succeeds in exposing it more. “I scratch more,” he says, with what he hopes is a blasé laugh. It's bold. Too bold. But if that's what they think he is, he can be that.

No point fighting it. The woman balks and then her face settles into stone. A moment passes in dead silence as Keith tries to pretend for his own sake that staring at the wall and not the person he's talking to is natural and polite and that maybe he didn't actually speak at all.

Shiro coughs and then clears his throat. “Have you tried the oysters? I think we'll—” He jerks his head toward one of the tables and tugs at Keith's belt in a way that must mean, _please, for the sake of my dignity, let's pretend this didn’t happen._

Keith downs the rest of his wine on the way there.

 

* * *

 

“Were you and Allura…” Keith searches for a word that isn’t _betrothed_ because he doesn't want to use something so solid. He doesn’t want to know that much. After their ungraceful escape and after Shiro introduced him to the wonders of shellfish and after at least three more glasses of undiluted wine, they retired back to the rooms. Now, they’re sitting at the little table where they take all their meals and Keith’s only regret is that they didn’t bring back any of the food with them. Wine, at least, they’re well stocked in.

Shiro leans forward a half an inch. That spot between his eyebrows is wrinkled again. “No. Never. Did you?” He swallows. “Have someone, I mean?”

Keith surprises himself with a laugh. Messy hair, sweat, the scar that stretches from his cheek to his neck. Even if he’d looked like Shiro, everyone around him was twice as big, twice as sweaty, and not interested. Keith is good at fighting, not good at people, and never at this. Maybe it’s the wine but he laughs again, a little hiccupping thing. “No,” he says, mimicking Shiro’s words back at him. “Never.”

He’s lost track of time. The wine is burning through him like a fire. Shiro's eyes drag over him from the other side of the table and then down at the candle between them, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “ _Never_ ,” he repeats. He picks up his glass, takes a sip that's more a gulp. “Can I ask you something?”

Keith nods.

“We can be friends, right?”

Shiro couldn’t have surprised him more if he’d reached across the table and slapped the wine out of Keith’s hand. He sounds a little breathless, as if it took courage to ask. He's too old to beg.

“But we're already married,” Keith says dumbly.

“Keith, you might not believe it, but I hear married people sometimes get along, too.” Shiro swirls his glass, little smile playing havoc across his face, before he takes another sip of wine. More of a gulp. Keith follows in kind, because he can and it seems rude not to. A bit of a flush lights Shiro's high cheekbones. Keith is sure he’s red to match.

Friends doesn't seem so hard. It's not a tall order, and he's been asked far worse.

“Sure.”

Shiro's eyes widen, fall to his lips, and then to the table, as if maybe he regrets asking. It was the wrong answer—a joke. He was joking and Keith is, as always, the fool for all conversations that don't involve a blade instead of words.

He rises from the table and manages a whole of three steps before a hand on his elbow stops him. “Keith. Thank you.”

That's not something you thank someone for. Shiro has earned it. Earned more. In a daze, he follows as Shiro tugs him to the bed and then pushes him down before Shiro flops back against the pillows in one great heave. “I shouldn't have drank so much.” He eyes Keith from under his bangs. “How are you still sober?”

He's not, but pride is a funny thing. “Galra are better at drinking, fighting, and f—” Keith cuts himself off, alcohol making the old saying roll off his tongue before he realizes where it's going to go. “—and friendship,” he finishes lamely. “I thought everyone knew that.”

Shiro shifts on the bed and when Keith glances over, he's staring from a few feet away, eyes bright. “I’m sure that's how the saying goes.”

It's not.

 

* * *

 

They talk an hour before they sleep, arguing about who won which battle and what Galra are better and worse at than Shiro. Wine makes the conversation slide between them.

But the wine also makes it impossible to sleep.

It’s a lie—Keith’s people don’t hold their liquor better. They just refuse to show it on a fundamental level. Or maybe it’s because Keith is only half and the skill skipped his generation. He starts to sweat around midnight and searches for a cold spot on the bed with his legs and arms, trying not to wake Shiro as he does. There’s a burning in him, an insistent pounding in his chest, a near-dizziness behind his eyes when he rolls his head against the pillow.

He must drift off. He must, because he starts to dream.

He can’t pick the moment it changes. He opens his eyes and the room is blue. The fire is still going, but dimmed to dark, flickering embers in colors a shade wrong. His blood is still running hot as a furnace—he shifts to the side, closer to Shiro by an inch, seeking even a degree of coolness.

The shock is when he finds it. He rolls into a pool of wet, like ice. There’s so much of it his hand slips in it as he rises to look. It’s not sweat. It’s too sticky, too thick.

“Shiro?” he asks, but there's no movement, no sound of breath from his side of the bed.

Keith rips the sheets back.

Shiro is pale as the snow outside and still as the water in the frozen brook that snakes around the gardens. The only color on him is the red of blood pooling around him, soaking their bed. It’s run from his mouth, staining his lips black. Keith knows what a corpse looks like. He’s seen a thousand.

That’s all this is. A corpse. Shiro is a corpse.

The heat from the wine floods from him in one breath as he reaches out to check for a pulse, but as he does he realizes there’s something in his hand. It takes his dizzy eyes a moment to focus on it, though he knows it by its familiar weight.

His knife, dark and dripping.

He wakes in a single burst at the sight of it, throwing the sheets off as he sits up, heaving for air, hand outstretched to throw the knife away from him though there’s nothing there. Everything in the room is too sharp, even as he tries to focus on any one thing to ground him in and can’t.

There's no blood. Shiro is on his side, breathing softly as he shifts, alive and whole.

A dream. That’s all.

Shiro rolls and rises. “What? What's going on?” He scratches at the back of his neck and blinks blearily, so alive that it takes Keith aback. He knows it was a dream. He knows, but then Shiro sits up the rest of the way and the sheets fall back. He's taken his shirt off to sleep and the stump of his right arm is out in full view for the first time.

Keith remembers the reports, hearing about it from a dozen places all at once it seemed like. The great general, down one arm, and no one could quite figure out who deserved congratulations for it. They made jokes and patted each other on the back. Keith avoided the fireside for a fortnight. It wasn't funny. It wasn't something to celebrate. It was part of war and it could have been Keith there, down an arm down or a leg or worse. Death didn't scare him, but not being able to fight did.

Of course, Shiro beat those odds too.

“Your arm,” Keith whispers, but he doesn't mean the arm. He means the dripping knife and pool of blood. He means the scar on Shiro’s nose, though he got that before the war. He means all of it. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t—”

The space between them is small enough now that Shiro can reach out a hand to cup his face. He slides his thumb under Keith's eye and for a horrible moment Keith thinks he's started crying, but he hasn't.

“My arm? Keith. Why are you sorry? You didn’t do this.” He drags his fingers lower over the scar on Keith's jaw. His skin is rough with callouses Keith knows from his own hands and years of endless practice, but the scar tissue isn't so sensitive. He can feel the drag of that touch and nothing else. “I did this.”

He did. It was early, almost their first meeting—but not, Keith realizes now. Not the very start. Shiro landed a lucky hit, Keith thought, until he learned better. None of Shiro's success was luck. He tore it from the horror of war with one hand tied behind his back. Now he wonders why the blow didn't rend his face in half. He reaches up to touch the scar, finds Shiro’s hand there still and grips that instead. “But you pulled the hit,” Keith whispers.

He pulled a few. Keith never returned that favor.

Shiro's expression doesn't change. “You're giving me too much credit.”

He's not.

“Go back to sleep,” Shiro adds when Keith doesn't untense or lie down, his voice still muzzy with sleep. Keith's heart is still in his throat, but to end the discussion Shiro reaches out and curls his arm around Keith's waist, hooking him in until Keith is tucked against him. Shiro didn't bathe so he doesn't smell like soap or oil. He smells like himself. Keith tries to be subtle about pushing his nose into the wide pillow they're sharing and then realizes what he's doing and makes a mental promise to never touch another glass of wine.

“I don't think about it anymore,” Shiro is mumbling. “Two arms… One too many. I don't even know what you do with the extra.”

“Pull on pants?”

Shiro snores.

 

* * *

 

It’s not the first bad dream and not the last. Not for either of them. He knows it’s been a bad night if he wakes up warmer than usual, with the phantom touch of a hand over his chest.

Keith tries to return the favor. If Shiro tosses and turns, Keith reaches out, rubs his back until he calms and sleeps. Once, when that’s not enough, he gets closer and presses himself to Shiro’s back, imagining himself as a second set of armor in whatever war he’s waging in his dreams. It works.

It’s only fair, Keith tells himself. It’s what a friend would do.

 

* * *

 

The war ends with a fall.

Later, it will seem too simple. Later, he’ll run over every move he made, every breath he took when he might have had a chance to change the outcome. It was less than a second—his foot slipped in the dark mud, made red by the fight and the rain. Shiro’s blows were like a battering ram against his blade. Every hit made his blood rise and his ears ring, until nothing else existed. It was only their third fight man-to-man. The first, he had both his arms. The second, he was crippled. The third and last, he was stronger, and the changes in his face and body gave Keith pause.

Pause in war is almost always fatal.

It’s four days of hard fighting, first. In that time, Keith doesn’t sleep. The army he’s built doesn’t operate on open field warfare—they’ve made their glory in guerilla tactics, in being too fast to catch, in being smarter. This isn’t smart, but smart left a long time ago. They didn’t expect a force as big as the one the king has brought to bear against them; what was supposed to be a route is one, but not for them.

On the dawn of the fourth day, he sends Kolivan off with the lion’s share of what’s left of their forces. There’s a canyon path that leads to a pass. They're still fresh enough to make it without much trouble, retreat, lick their wounds, ready for the next round. They’ve been doing this for years, but this is different.

Kolivan fights him on it. He calls it stupidity, calls Keith a fool, tries to pull rank and then age, and stops just short of a coup. “You’re not in a position to make this decision,” he says finally. “You’re too tired.” He’s breathing hard. They’ve been marching hard for the better half a day, and they can still see smoke from the army’s approach on the horizon, rising to the low clouds that look ready to unleash their own violence.

“I—”

“No! You haven't slept, not in days. This isn't a solution—this is stupidity.” He's angry now. It's been years since Keith made him angry. It’s been years since Keith heard his voice as anything but placid and inexorable. “You’re not stupid.”

It starts to rain.

 

* * *

 

Later, he’ll tell himself it’s the fall, but it’s not.

The rain doesn't stop. Not for hours, not for days, but that first one is all that matters. It's nightfall when Keith finally convinces Kolivan to go. The remainder of the force makes a ragtag camp along the cliffs, enough to keep the rain off. In a way, the rain is a blessing. It comes rushing out of the canyon at their back, a temporary flood to keep the army at bay. It won't do much in the morning, but no one wants to hike uphill in the dark, in the rain, in the mud.

They're still as outnumbered come daylight.

Fighting is what he's good at. It fuels him, gives him purpose. It's always seemed like a bit of a cheat that this is all he has to do for glory and what's right: just fight. Only fight. Only kill, and do it fast, and do it beautifully. He's not sure he would know how to do anything else now. Still, four days is three too many. That was true yesterday. Today is the fifth.

He slept a little, but he's most worried that if someone knocks him off his balance, he'll fall asleep in the mud. There are little black spots dancing at the edge of his gaze, but he tells himself it's mud flying and lets it be. There's no goal in this fight—only to prolong it. Maybe some of them will make a late escape up the mountain when the mud starts to harden under the sun. He’ll give the order when the time is right.

At high noon, he tells himself. Less than an hour left. The sun keeps blinking at him between cloud banks, wind whipping them by like a procession of ships in a picture book. He’s never seen the ocean first hand, but it’s midway in a list of things he’d like to see, learn taste, and be, or would have in some other life. Not this one. When he gives the order, he won’t be going with them.

His hair needs cutting. It falls in his eyes and sticks there, and he lets it as he stares up and watches the sky for that one moment.

He doesn’t see the man’s approach until it’s almost too late to put any distance between them. The man must be distracted, too, because he wastes his surprise. Keith spares a moment to push the hair off his face and slick it back with the mess of everything that's accumulated on his glove and rushes in.

The man is in functional, simple armor, but he has the build to wear plating over the leather. Keith doesn't. It makes Keith slow and they don't have the spare smiths to make it custom. It will make this man slow, too. Keith’s strength is speed and he knows how to use it. The man brings up his sword with a bit-off curse. It’s massive, as he is, but he’s only using one hand to wield it.

No—he only has one hand. Keith is halfway through his next swing before he makes the connection. The man blocks hard, pushes back with so much force that Keith skids and loses his footing, stumbling away. The man uses the distance and time to tear off his helmet.

Hair like snow, eyes that burn, and a scar over the bridge of his nose. If could still fear, he might fear this.

Of the whole five days, that’s the longest man-to-man fight. No one is as good as Keith—no one but the king. Despite himself, he starts to enjoy it, with the heady fever of a battle haze. They’re both tired, both clumsy, both overstretched to have this fight here. It’s a risk for the king, but not for Keith. This is his last fight. The moment the adrenaline wears off, he’s spent. Even if he wins, he’s done.

He won’t win.

At the corner of his eyes, he can see his own guard reassess and close in, but they have their own fights to content with and they have orders, too. No one is touching this man. Not while Keith fights him.

Keith ducks under the blade and goes for something fancy with a feint, but he’s too tired to make good on it. He spins around the king, but not fast enough to do anything with the open strike. The king’s back isn’t well armored. Must be difficult to fit armor without an arm to fit it around or brace it on. The armor isn’t as custom as he thought; it’s too small. Or the king has gotten too bulky for it.

His white shirt under the black leather and silver plate is brown with mud and sweat, but somehow his hair is still white. Always. He’s beautiful.

 _You’re too tired,_ Kolivan whispers.

The black spots are back, like moths fluttering between the flash of sword and armor as the sun rises and sets on them all, over and over.

His pause is only a half a second, less, but long enough. The king turns his head, eyes flashing, and when he spins and makes his strike, all his strength is in it. Keith blocks and then feels the mud give under his boot.

A tiny slip, and enough, with the king’s sword still grinding against his.

The fall stuns him. It knocks the air out of his chest. A hush and quiet settles over everything, more than the ringing in his ears. His soldiers are watching, and so are the king’s, but Keith only has eyes for him and his wide, stunned eyes.

Keith starts to sit up, tries, but exhaustion has caught up with him at last. He slips in the mud again and gives it up, gulping for air, knowing the picture he makes as he struggles in the mud. He keeps his hand on his blade, at least. As long as he has that, it’s not a yield, not a surrender. The king knows that. He still hasn’t moved, staring down at Keith with sun in his sopping hair. It looks like ice.

His sword is still up.

He’s assessing, but Keith’s armor is a joke. One good hit will do it and end this—once across the neck, or a quick piercing of his thin-leather chest piece, let the life bleed out of him fast. Cut off the head of the snake. Sue for peace with Kolivan. End all of this. Keith closes his eyes, lets his neck bare.

The blow comes down to the left of Keith’s neck. The force of it splatters mud across his face, makes him wince by reflex.

When he opens his eyes again, there’s a hand floating before him. Keith stares at it dumbly, and then twists his head to look at the blade stuck fast in the mud beside him.

A decision. This is the king making a choice.

Keith tries not to hate him for it.

“I don’t want to kill you.” The king’s voice is hoarse, as tired as Keith feels. He really is beautiful, in the most distant way. “I’m not going to kill you. Please.” He moves his hand closer, insistent.

His guard is down. Keith could bring up his blade in an instant. He could run it through the seam in the side of the king’s armor or the loose joint under his right shoulder. He could turn it back to a knife and slide it across his throat once he’s in close enough. He could slap away the hand, spit in his face, fight another ten years, another twenty, until his forces are dwindling to nothing and his country is broken and he’s gained another hundred scars. Let the fight pass to someone else, the way it passed to him.

Keith takes his hand. The grip is strong and solid. On the way up, he slips again. His adrenaline is spinning out; he can’t catch his footing and so he tips into the king’s shoulder. The king’s arm comes up around Keith’s back, steadying him, and Keith realizes he’s not tired—he’s done.

He drops the dagger and brings up his other hand to grip at the king’s armor, not sure if he wants to push himself off or keep himself there, not sure if he has the strength to do either. Neither of them speak, still breathless.

Around them, the battle is slowing. A horse without a rider gallops by. More soldiers are stopping, crowding in to watch the spectacle they make. Someone shouts. Keith thinks for a moment he could fall asleep right there, lie down in the mud with this stranger and stay there until the war ceases to exist. It’s a thought from someone else, from some other mind. It must be.

The king’s troops surround them along with the remainders of Keith’s skeleton force, all weapons lowered. No one needs to be told to stand down. It’s a surrender.

It’s just—no one has ever seen both sides do it at the same time.

 

* * *

 

Horses are brought up. Keith rides double with the king on the back of his massive soot-colored animal; he doesn’t have one of his own. It’s all he can do to not fall asleep against the body in front of him; the thousand eyes on him help some. Black still dots and shadows his vision. He wonders if the king is as tired and better at hiding it.

He’s taken straight to the biggest tent, right at the center of the camp. It has a wide wood fold-out table, candles on little stands and hanging from the struts holding up the canvas walls and high top. Furs are piled on what Keith realizes with a bone-shaking need must be a bed. The king pushes him toward it.

Keith sits on the edge, as if in a trance, and then people start piling into the tent, three at a time. Antok and two other of Keith’s guard are with them, Keith notices with a little shock. They march in and flank Keith like they’re daring anyone to tell them not to.

“I’m sorry,” Keith whispers for their ears. The first he’s spoken in hours. He doesn’t care who else hears, but he hasn’t got the voice for it now.

Antok turns to him, face twisted into something Keith can’t identify. It’s more emotion than he’s seen the man display before. He gives curt shake of his head and then reaches out, sets a hand on Keith’s shoulder, and squeezes. He doesn’t say a word. No one says anything, not for a long time, the king standing between his generals and Keith, still watching his prisoner.

And then, with a jerk of his head he says, “Out. All of you.” It’s an order.

Keith sends his guards off with a nod. The king argues with his generals for a minute before they grudgingly file out, and then the king turns back to him.

“What do you want?” he asks, question bare. It’s the first time he asks it, but soon it will become a mantra between them.

Keith thinks about it and then swallows, his throat too dry to make words at first. “I want to end this.” He knows even as he says it that it’s an impossible want.

Nothing will get Kolivan to stand down if Keith is their capture. They’re trained better than that. Kolivan trained _him_ better than that. Nothing will get the king’s generals to stop their crusade, not after what Keith’s predecessors did. Not after what Keith did. His eyes settle dully on the king’s missing arm, and the way the cloth and armor is mismatched and ill-fitting around it. Not his blow, but it might as well have been.

“I don’t know how,” Keith admits.

The king stares at him in silence and then the smallest hint of a smile flits across his face.

“I might have an idea.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [fic on [tumblr](http://arahir.tumblr.com/post/182167823090/your-sharp-and-glorious-thorn-7k-part-2-of-3)] [fic on [twitter](https://twitter.com/arahir/status/1087052406997671936)]


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **If you got an email for this chapter and it said 3/3, it was a lie.** I split it this chapter and the last one and forgot to change it at the time of posting. I'm so sorry!!

_I might have an idea,_ he said. _But it’s a bad one._

He’s not wrong, but bad isn’t the right word. Foolish would be better, and maybe Keith is a fool to agree to it. The negotiations take days. Keith sends a rider for Kolivan—horse courtesy of Shiro, because they have none and no paper to write a missive on, even. Shiro puts the rest of Keith’s troops under guard, as much for their own protection as anyone else’s. Prisoners are released, the dead are buried, agreements are drawn up and then burnt and then redrawn over and over until everyone is at their wit’s end.

One agreement, the one-eyed general slices apart with his knife and then burns over a candle, strip by strip as they’re all made to watch. Another, Kolivan takes and tucks into his belt after muttering something about the latrine trench under his breath.

Keith still gets the sweeter end of the deal. Sovereignty, trade terms that have his advisors raising their brows and then whispering. Fair. More than fair, for a losing side, and the only cost is simple. Negligible, almost.

In return, they get him.

It’s not that simple. Keith isn’t desirable on his own—he’s collateral. A special case. No one on his side will move against Shiro if it puts Keith at risk. Loyalty has weight and the Galra flatter themselves that they have more of it than Shiro’s people ever will. Keith thinks: they’re right, and this is what brought them all to war in the first place. One bad leader brought them to this.

Keith signs it wordlessly and hopes he’s not the second verse to that song.

The conditions are stringent. Keith is a rebel and a risk. If he’s given a horse, he’ll run. If he’s given a sword or even a knife, they think they’ll wake up to Shiro’s corpse and blood. Maybe, they say, Keith will kill himself, too. He’s capable of anything. Ten years taught them that and every other hard lesson. He doesn’t know how to stop, they say, and the thought that he will for Shiro, for this alliance, is laughable. Shiro will bleed for it. The entire kingdom will.

But, of course, they don’t account for everything. They don’t have all the facts. The only thing stronger in Keith now than the fight is the incipient need to prove them wrong. All that day and first night after the signing, something new grows in him. It spreads out, finds its pace, turns from something faint and desperate to an all-encompassing hold that grips his limbs to stillness and pulls his head to rest against the soft furs of the bed in the tent that’s been his happy cell since they rode into camp. He can hear them talking still, hushed.

“You can’t let him sleep here again. He should be locked up.”

A man laughs. “Look at him. He’s tired. He’s not going to do anything.” The voice is close, rough, now familiar. “He’s so young,” it says, lowering.

“So are you. I hope you know what you’re doing.” Silence, for a moment. Movement. When the other voice starts again, it’s distant and quiet. “Shiro. If you look at him like that in front of anyone else, there will be trouble. Be careful.”

 

* * *

 

Most of his imaginings in the quiet of their bed at night end in blood, even months later. It would have been easier, if nothing else. Cleaner, If he'd twisted his neck right, risen fast enough, forced Shiro's hand. He tries to imagine what it would have felt like, his hand pressed over the hollow of his throat in the dark. The sound of Shiro breathing beside him is oddly soothing in those moments.

The bed is big enough that they don't touch. They could exist in two separate worlds, but somehow his heat still reaches and he must be cold at night; he starts waking up closer, inch by inch, a glacial progress that seems like nothing until he wakes up one day to Shiro's face a foot away in sleep. He's not a pretty sleeper. He snores and kicks and mumbles, but he looks so young like this. For the span of three heartbeats, Keith fights the urge to reach out and curl a finger around one of his, just to touch.

There isn't any hate left, if it was ever there at all. There isn't any fear. Now, his biggest enemy is the mundanity of this life and Shiro is the sole force standing before that tide, stemming it. He takes on too much.

 _Let me do something,_ he wants to say.

Shiro has bags under his eyes. Keith traces them in the fire light, and the little wrinkles starting to form at the corner of his eyes. Even in sleep, there's a line between his eyebrows now. He wants to reach out and press his finger to it, but he doesn't. Instead, before dawn, he slides out of bed and dresses in the far room before he pulls the curtains shut and then slips out the door, as quiet as he can.

It's his luck Hunk and Lance are on guard. “He's sleeping in,” Keith tells them. “Does he have any…” he searches for a word that sounds proper and settles on, “...audiences today?”

They share a look. “I don't know?”

“Who would?” One of the generals might, but he's not dealing with Iverson or Sanda before the sun is up. They'd probably assume it was some convoluted attempt at a coup anyway. Keeping Shiro from breakfast and a dawn meeting—the deviousness of it all.

“Allura would,” Lance says. It’s a surprise. He’s not usually so forthcoming and he says the name fast, almost eager, no hesitation. He shifts from foot to foot and then gives a little shrug. “I could take you. I mean, if you really need to talk to her. If you insist.”

Keith has to shove down his smile. Hunk rolls his eyes over Lance’s head. “I’ll just stay here. And guard. Alone.”

Lance looks at him as if this is a betrayal of the highest order and then leans in. “Weren’t you late for training last week? I’m having trouble remembering, but I feel like… Yeah, someone covered for you.” He snaps his fingers. “Oh, that’s right. _I_ did.”

“Okay, well that’s—”

“He’s taking me. We’re going now.” Keith shoves Lance in the back in what he hopes is the right direction.

“Other way,” Lance and Hunk say in tandem.

 

* * *

 

It’s been months now, but the halls still confound him. More than once, Hunk and Lance have had to come fetch him from some wing of the palace he didn’t know existed to get lost in. They’re getting better at catching up with him after he gives them the slip. As far as games go, it’s not so bad.

Everything outside is still shrouded in white and while the stables at least are warm, the training grounds aren’t and Keith hasn’t been brave enough to go himself. He could. No one would stop him, but that’s a theoretical knowledge and not one he wants to test yet. Appearances are something he’s only now learning to met out for himself.

The Galra didn’t care what he was or what he did as long as he could also fight. As long as he had honor.

“She’s in the library,” Lance is saying. “She’s always there. Doing stuff.”

It’s more than Lance has said in a long while. Usually it’s a muttered comment about Keith’s clothing choice or how he managed to get away from them and, just once, something derogatory about the Galra before Hunk elbowed him hard. Next time, he’d had an apology for it. “What does she do?” Keith asks, not wanting to break the thread.

“Oh. Save the world. I don’t know.” He sounds a little lackadaisical, a little wry. “She probably could if she wanted to.”

“Who is she?”

Lance stops and turns back to him. “I thought you knew. She’s the princess of Altea.”

All the breath sucks from the air around Keith so fast his ears start to ring. He should have known, by her hair, by her position, by the way everyone looks at her. Altea was what started the war— not the Alteans, but their destruction, the utter and senseless ruin. Back when the Galra had the numbers to conquer and the taste for it, too.

A war doesn’t stop because the one who started it died. Attrition for attrition, the Coalition said, and no one could blame them for that. Keith just wanted to survive.

“How could you not know?” Lance asks when Keith hasn’t moved or spoken for moments, voice edged. The cold from outside is back, leaking through the windows. They don’t keep the fires going on this side of the palace. “After what _you_ did—”

“I’ve never been to Altea.”

If he had, he might have seen the ocean while he was there. It was a little, lovely country nestled on the coast between their two bigger nations. It was beautiful, they say. White towers, and gardens, a place of science and learning. A prime target for a specific and cruel statement. Its marks are all over this palace, though, all over the city outside it and the streets he can’t walk on his own in safety, because the memory for annihilation is so, so long.

Lance turns away again and starts walking. Keith follows, sure now that he’ll regret this.

When they get there, the great doors are already open. She’s hidden back among the stacks, at a table by one of the East-facing windows, limned in the dawning sun as she pores over some book.

Keith clears his throat. She jerks in surprise and there, again, is the smile. If it’s fake, she’s incredible, but it almost can’t be real. Still, when she greets them with a quiet, “Keith. Lance,” her expression doesn’t change. It must be genuine, at least in part.

“Hi Princess,” Lance greets back, awkward for the first time since Keith has met him, and then the conversation drops between the two like a rock in water. Interesting. Keith wasn’t aware Lance had the capacity to blush. He excuses himself with a salute that’s absolutely not to protocol, a fact he seems to realize at the exact moment he makes it.

Once he’s gone, Allura puts a hand over her mouth, staring after him. Keith can see her shoulders shaking, until she remembers her guest and turns her smile back to him.

 _How can you smile at me?_ he wants to ask. Instead he says, “I’m sorry for interrupting,” and nods at the book. “It must be important.”

“Actually—well. No. It’s a romance.” She colors.

He wonders how old she was when Altea was destroyed. She can’t be much older than him, if she is at all. “I’m sorry,” he repeats. “About your family.” There won’t be a better time to apologize, or a better place. This is one of those things that has to be treated with care but can’t be, because nothing about that time was careful. It was bloody, hideous, inelegant. A mess, through and through.

She’s quiet a moment, the only sound the pop and crack from the fireplace at the heart of the room. “It’s not your fault. For so many years I was angry, but you didn’t do it. When Shiro told me what he wanted to do, I still thought it was ridiculous, but he was right.” If she thinks so, it must be half-true at least. Her smile widens. “I’m glad you’re here. I’ve never seen him so happy as the day he rode back into the city with you on his horse.” She laughs and then looks at him, right in the eyes, right in the heart. “But are you happy here, I wonder?”

Honesty for honesty. He owes her that much, at least. “I don’t know.” As he says it, he knows it’s the wrong answer. “I will be,” he amends, making it a promise. None of this is why he came. He takes a break. “Does Shiro—does the king have to do anything today?”

“Do… anything?”

He winces at his own wording. “Like work.” And of course he does, he realizes. Talking around the issue was never his style, anyway. “Is it anything I can do for him,” he amends.

Allura sits up straighter. “You want to?”

No. He’d rather go roll in the mud outside or spend the entire day trying to make small talk with Hunk and Lance, but he wants to do something. He wants to help—to be useful. It was in the agreement. _In whatever capacity he may be of use._ It was added by Shiro’s advisors and Kolivan bristled at some implication Keith was still too tired to suss out of the endless mass of fine words and pitied whoever had to scribble out iteration after iteration.

It might have been Allura, he realizes. She smiles at him, but it’s tight. “I think it’s still too early for that.” He’s surprised, for a moment, at the tightness in his throat. Too early. She’s quick to add, “It’s a meeting on budgets, I don’t think you would—”

“How long is it going to be too early? I’ve been here for months. I haven’t done anything.”

“That’s not up to me.”

“But you know them—”

“Keith. They won’t trust you with a sword yet. They won’t trust you with the kingdom. Give it time.”

It’s one thing to suspect it, to know it, and another to hear it confirmed by someone who would know. Give it time, she says, as if he has anything else to offer. They think of him as some exotic thing, as danger and magic, though it’s his blade that changes, not him, and that’s his only trick.

 _I dropped by blade second_ , he wants to rage. _I had a chance, I had a choice, and I had chose this._ Every day, he chooses to stay. A hundred times over he could have ruined them since he came. Or he could be up in the hills, watching the sunrise, already on his way home. Shiro would never break the armistice now. He would be heartbroken, maybe, but the war is done, and that won’t change.

Keith stomps out the thought and draws himself up. “Cancel it, then.”

She frowns. “It can’t just be—”

“Reschedule it.” The words aren’t a suggestion. “You know he’s exhausted. Give him a day.”

She doesn’t argue, nodding instead. He can’t attend a meeting or touch a weapon, but he can at least order his husband a day of peace. It’s a feeble victory, but more than he’s had since he came here.

 

* * *

 

Back in their room, Shiro is still out cold. He usually sleeps in a light shirt and pants for Keith’s benefit, but now the blankets are pushed off and the shirt is pushed up over his stomach, hair half plastered over his eyes by sleep.

Keith finds he doesn’t know what to do with himself. Getting back in bed isn’t unappealing, but it seems too personal, too close. Instead, he perches on the corner, by Shiro’s feet, and watches him. Even his eyelashes are starting to go pale. It makes it seem as though he’s just stepped in from the snow.

He blinks awake after some interminable amount of time that Keith marks by the stark white cast of the light that’s edging in around the curtains now. Shiro doesn’t notice him at first, but then he freezes mid-stretch. “Good… morning?”

Keith realizes only after the fact that waking up to his former enemy watching him sleep might not have been ideal. “Morning,” Keith says, trying to make it light.

“What’s going on?” Shiro rolls to one side, notices the blinds are drawn, and sits up fully. “What time is it?”

“Late. Sorry.” Late for him, but not past mid-morning. His blood pounds at the confusion in Shiro's eyes. There will be consequences. He’s not an idiot and Shiro’s patience with him can’t be infinite.

Shiro rises the rest of the way and rips off the blankets, running his hand through his hair. “I’m supposed to meet with Sanda at noon and then Montgomery and—”

“It got rescheduled,” Keith says softly, and then adds, “I asked them to reschedule it.” Shiro’s already got his shirt off, and now he turns to stare at Keith, holding the cloth in one hand. Keith waits for the crack in his composure, waits for the rage, and tries to imagine what he would do in Shiro’s place. “Are you mad?”

“No.” Shiro frowns. “But why…?”

“Because you look like someone’s been dragging you behind their horse. I hate watching it.” Shiro looks like a bare wind could push him over in that moment. “I thought ending the war would make things easier, for both of us," Keith explains quietly. Not this. Not Shiro run ragged and Keith kept in seclusion, some preserved relic of a past everyone would best left forgotten. Some footnote in the books in Allura's library—the king who married a rogue prince and never slept another day in his life. No. It won't be that way. “If you've changed your mind, I could always steal a sword and give it another try.”

Keith doesn't think of the blade strapped to his leg or what Shiro would say if he knew about it. But Shiro, still frozen, shifts finally and looks down at him.

He grins. ”Actually, that's not a bad idea.”

 

* * *

 

Lance and Hunk were right—the training grounds are a mess. The arena floor isn't so much ice as a beautiful mix of half-melted snow, mud, and what has to be horse dung. It's disgusting. Keith wants to kick it at someone just to see it fly. Everything in the palace is white and everything on Shiro is white and Keith promises himself that by the end of the day, he'll have changed that.

“Here—” Shiro tosses him a practice blade. It's carved out of hardwood, dulled, but as soon as Keith catches it, he can feel the weight of it. It's heavy as a real blade, but not sharp enough to leave worse than a bad bruise. The guards stationed around the arena don’t seem comforted. Keith feels their collective flinch as he gives it a test swing. The blond looks the most anxious but Shiro’s other regular guard is a stone-faced woman. She glared at the blond on their way to the grounds and cowed him when he started to argue.

No one has told him what happened to the man she replaced, but then, maybe it was at one of the meetings he wasn’t invited to.

Their anxiety is insulting anyway. As if Keith would hurt him here and now, of all places, of all times. As if Shiro would let him. The entire place is full of guards half-training half-watching the pair in the corner. Keith wants to do something stupid to scare them, but discretion is his new friend.

Shiro is gearing for the fight already. His eyes are gleaming. If Keith came at him from a dead rest, just like this, he would be ready. The knowledge thrills up his spine.

He tests the blade again in a short chop and a thrust, just to see them all draw a breath. The weight of it is perfect. Shiro is a good judge. Keith wonders if he used to train recruits and then realizes all his knowledge of Shiro before the war is fourth-hand at best, intel gathered by tired scouts—old rumors and sometimes less than that even.

Shiro is still near. He reaches out and closes his hand over the bare, dull wood blade. “Do you need gloves?”

Keith shakes his head. “No.” It’s cold, but he’s used to it. More than used to it—something about it is familiar and horrible and perfect. He takes a pronounced step back, pulling the sword away, and Shiro’s entire stance shifts with the motion.

He’s ready. He’s ready, and Keith has needed this for weeks now.

The first swing he goes in for is wide on purpose, meant to put some space between them. It works. Shiro skips back a step and Keith presses his advantage, trying to make his motions unpredictable. Easier said than done. Shiro knows his moves; you don’t forget what you’ve learned at the point of a sword, but Keith is good and the last time they fought, he was already exhausted.

Now he’s rested, ready, and eager. The first few minutes of blows are nothing but a warm up, neither of them putting their full strength in, but after they establish a rhythm he shifts his stance. His next strike he feints as a thrust at the same time he brings his leg out to kick at Shiro’s side. Shiro twists to block it, in time for Keith to shift his weight and the trajectory of his blade.

It manages a little slice through the cloth over his unarmored shoulder. Keith thrills with the little victory, but his heart stutters, too, because he doesn’t want to draw blood, doesn’t want to cause any real damage.

The hesitation is enough. Shiro’s eyes shine. He mimics Keith’s kick, but, Keith realizes too late, only to make an opening for his blade. Keith jerks back and the cloth parts smoothly along the edge of Shiro’s sword, drawing a tiny line of blood across his chest.

The shock is when he doesn’t stop. He follows up with his elbow—not hard but enough to rattle Keith’s head, to split his lip, to send him staggering back. Keith brings his spare hand up to his mouth, surprised despite himself. Shiro has been gentle with him, but he has the capacity to be something else entirely. Keith forgot that.

The reminder is triumphant. Keith grins at him, feels the slip of blood across his teeth and lips.

Now it’s Shiro’s turn to be surprised. He pulls the blade away, but too fast, too far. Keith drops his and goes for something more economical. He punches Shiro’s elbow, a quick strike at the point where he knows the nerve is. Shiro drops his sword almost without meaning to. In any long fight, it’s not him who will tire first, and that was always true of the two of them more than any other pair. Keith’s is speed, Shiro is the long-haul. The only way Keith can win is by downing him and fast. He’s already at the edge of his own endurance, blood beating so loud through his veins that it makes his ears hum.

Not once has he had Shiro under him like this. Not once has Keith been able to floor him, to bring him down, to have this man at his mercy. Now, it’s better than the wine after one of their intolerable parties, better than galloping a horse across an open field, better than any win has ever been.

Shiro’s neck strains, sweat beading on his skin, on his brow, sticking his hair there. Only he could make the mud seem kingly—as if he fell there on purpose, for a rest. Keith is sure he didn’t look half so glorious when it was him in that position.

A small and strange part of him wants to drop his sword. Wants to fall, wants to settle over that body, to hold him down and revel in the victory. He pushes it aside but can’t still the shudder the runs down his spine.

“We should do this more often,” Keith grits out between his teeth, leveling his blade at Shiro. The words taste like copper. Shiro’s smile has gone strange, almost demonic, the light in his eyes like a literal flame in the light that blinks off the ice beyond the arena. “Yield?” Keith asks.

He reaches out a hand before Shiro answers. Shiro drops his sword to take it. Keith imagines this at the end of that battle, their last, and the mercy of it, the grace. His blood is still singing; it’s not the same place, not the same mood. The body in the mud is precious to him now. It would be worth a war to pull him out of it.

The thought strikes him out of nowhere and shocks him, but not as much as the weight of Shiro’s grip in his hand. He doesn’t have another arm to push himself up with and his long legs are still strewn in front of him. Keith tightens his hold, heaves, and just like that, the look in Shiro’s eyes changes. He’s always been good at not projecting his moves before he makes them.

Keith is in the mud with him before the fall registers.

Shiro rolls just out of the way, shoulders shaking with mirth as Keith gathers his breath and his wits back and tries to comprehend what’s just happened.

“You’re dead,” Keith says, distant to his own ears as mud seeps in through his thin shirt.

Shiro is still laughing. “I’m sorry—you looked so serious—I had to.”

Keith slaps a hand out, gathers a handful of mud, and slings it at Shiro half-hearted. Shiro flinches away, even as his pale bangs catch the worst of it, and then sits there in the mud with eyes so wide they look like they might fall out of his head. It's Keith's turn to laugh and he does, so hard he starts to fall over again.

Shiro steadies him and then pulls him up by the shoulder of his tunic like Keith is a misbehaving child, but the smile is back and it has a new light to it. It makes Keith's blood spark oddly, a tug and pull that starts behind his collar bone and spreads to the pit of his stomach where it settles in settles down and makes a space for itself.

Another small laugh escapes his throat. Shiro huffs and then, with the hand still on his shoulder, tugs him in.

This is the part of the spar where you shake hands, but the rule must not hold for married couples. He’s warm and strong and smells of sweat and mud. They part and their crowd seems to realize the excitement is over. Keith expects a quick dispersal and a few dirty looks, but that's not what he gets. Instead, someone starts to clap and then it starts a cascade of raucous cheers, some gloating, some groaning as bets are paid and argued. It's not proper at all.

Keith loves it. “Do you think we could move into the barracks?” Keith asks under his breath.

Shiro claps him on the back. “I know they seem nice, but the smell... It's not worth it.”

“...I don’t think you can talk.”

 

* * *

 

He's right, as usual. Their rooms also have a bath which is one of the few glories about this life, though Keith doesn't have time to dwell on it often. It isn't big. A white marble basin with piping for hot water that works in ways mysterious to him. Altean design is a marvel. Shiro has it first, because Keith’s comment earned him that much at least. Keith sits on the stool in the corner and tries to pick the worst of the mud out of his hair while Shiro sighs and makes little sounds in the water that do something to Keith’s blood that they shouldn’t.

By the time he’s out, Keith’s gaze is fastened to the marble floor as if his life depends on it. He waits until Shiro excuses himself to strip, struck by some sudden shyness he doesn’t try to fight.

It feels like a precipice he’s been walking the edge of for weeks has started to give under his feet. He has no idea where he’ll land when he falls. He’s glad for the moment alone, at least, and the heat of the water. It’s barely past noon, but their only remaining plan for the day is dinner and that’s what Shiro deserves, Keith thinks to himself. Already, the color in his face is better, and the lines under his eyes have started to ease.

A few more days like this, and he’ll be fine. If this is all he can do, it’s enough.

The thought settles over his mind as he closes his eyes and sinks back in the steaming water, letting it flow over his hair and sore muscles. The image behind them is of Shiro in the mud, looking up at him through his salt-and-pepper eyelashes, grinning. The war feels so far away now. A bad memory, almost faded.

But it won’t ever fade completely. It sits on his skin, in scars and aches. A thousand good days can’t overwrite a lifetime of fighting.

He spends a half an hour in the water, listening to it tick by in the drip of the faucet, trying to pick out the spot where his foundations began to crack, because they’re gone now. You can’t build a life on a war that’s been lost, or a castle that’s half a thousand miles distant as the crow flies, and Shiro has asked him a half a hundred times what he wants.  Every time his answer has been feeble. The bare minimum, at best. He wants to not be cold, to not fight, to eat food, to not die alone, to let his people live.

Now, he thinks, he could form something tangible. It’s shape in his mind takes the form of a smile and a warm body and pale hair.

He rises from the water, all at once, struck by some sudden inspiration, still unsure what he can ask for beyond a few fights and a day off now and then. He barely manages to pull on a pair of the thin cloth pants by the door before he steps out. They’re too baggy, but good enough he thinks as he steps out the door, dripping water behind him.

“Shiro—” he cuts the name short, lets it die on his tongue as soon as he sees the room is empty.

Confusion close to hurt rises until the sound of a voice reaches him, muffled. The doors to the outer room are closed, but as soon as he steps toward it, he can tell it's Shiro and he's not alone. He's talking to someone familiar, though the voice isn’t one Keith can place immediately. All Shiro’s advisors run together in his mind.

“You weren't born into this. You're risking too much now,” the man says.

“What, by actually enjoying his company? Is that a crime?” Shiro asks. His voice is edged and Keith has the unpleasant experience of discovering how it feels to know a conversation is about him. No—an argument.

“... You're too blind.  We've already had desertions over this. Your _own—_ ”

Keith lays a hand on the door and tries to finish the sentence for him. Desertions. The cause isn’t so hard to suss out.

“I know,” Shiro snaps, cutting him off, and then softer: “I know.” After a moment, Shiro sighs.  “He's an asset. We should use him, at least. He wants to help and we agreed to terms—”

“Terms to get him into your bed, you mean,” a third voice says. The words are so caustic, even Keith seizes up at the sound of them.

A silence like the burial after a battle, when there’s nothing left even for crows to pick over, settles over the room.

“Get _out_.”

This tone is new. Keith has never heard Shiro use it, not in all their time together, not in battle, not in quiet. This is dangerous. Nothing happens for a moment that stretches and stretches and then the sound of heavy footfalls and a slamming door echoes from the antechamber, so loud that Keith misses the set of footsteps headed toward him and almost falls over backwards to scramble out of the way of the door as Shiro comes bursting into the room.

Keith doesn’t bother pretending he hasn’t been listening, but Shiro doesn’t seem surprised to see him there, though he does a double-take when he sees Keith is only half-dressed. He doesn’t sigh but stands there, seeming at a loss. “Sorry,” he says after a moment.

Keith shakes his head. “Desertions?”

“It doesn’t matter.” His gaze settles at the center of Keith’s chest and sticks there as if he can’t meet Keith’s eyes, as if he doesn’t have the energy to look at anything else. “I should have gone with you instead. It might have been easier. Everyone thinks they can run things better than me.” He sounds so very tired. “And maybe they can. But your people—” He looks up, at last, eyes full with something Keith wouldn’t know how to describe if there was a knife to his throat. “—they adore you. They would follow you anywhere. I don’t know how you do it.”

Heat creeps across his chest, and now there’s no cloth to hide it. Compliments are new and he realizes only after a beat that this is one and that he has no answer for it. Shiro is better than he is in every way a person can be, in every way a king can be. Instead, Keith says simply and honestly, “I would follow you.”

Shiro blinks at him, and then down, and Keith follows his gaze to the floor, thinking dully that it shouldn’t be so difficult to look at a man who’s fought him to the mud more than once now.

“You would,” Shiro says, either a question or a statement, disbelief or chagrin.

Keith tries to imagine it. If he was born in this place instead, if he’d enlisted in some other country’s war before he knew his mother, if he’d had Shiro has his commander, watched him fight without end, past even the loss of his arm, watched him struggle and win. He imagines himself as one of the guards out in the hall instead, his life resting on the shoulders of his one man.

It’s not so hard to imagine. It doesn’t seem like it would be so bad of a life, either.

Keith forces himself to raise his gaze, to look the king dead in the eyes. “Anywhere.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, the chapter number for this changed again, but it's finished and more. Thank you so much for reading and I hope you enjoy the last chapter! I hope to have it done next Monday, school allowing. 
> 
> You can find me on and [pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.io/arahir) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/arahir), where I post previews and fic that I'm too lazy to post here. (And [tumblr](http://arahir.tumblr.com) as a banned blog, but we don't talk about that.)


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I updated the tags! There's blood in this chapter and it's not in a flashback. Please beware. It's not gratuitous, but yeah.

“What are you going to name him?”

“...Why do I have to name him?” Keith asks.

Shiro stares at him and then at the puppy that’s been tugging at the edge of his cloak since Keith set it down. It keeps tripping over its big paws, rolling over its own tail, and coming back for a second go, as if Shiro’s cloak killed its last friend and it’s out for vengeance.

“I guess you don’t.” Shiro takes a handful of his cloak and tugs it back without force, pulling the puppy across the marble while it growls. “He’s so strong,” Shiro half-laughs.

It’s been eating a steady diet of meat scraps, courtesy of the kitchen and courtesy of Romelle who, it turns out, knows most of everything about the ins and outs of the palace and is more than happy to spread mischief if it includes free food and puppies.

A bit of pride swells in Keith’s chest. “He’s going to be big when he grows up.” He picks the puppy up before it can do any actual damage to the fine embroidered cloth at Shiro’s hem and sets it on its back in his lap, its little feet kicking as Keith rubs its plump belly. Shiro kneels down next to him and sets a hand next to Keith’s and then laughs when it rolls and tries to go for Shiro’s fingers instead.

“He’s already a menace.” He looks up at Keith, grinning. “I think he reminds me of someone.”

Keith frowns. “Who?”

Shiro makes a noncommittal sound and then picks the puppy up one-handed, holding it up next to Keith’s face and then looks over his shoulder. “Matt. Hey.”

Matt looks up and his eyes go wide as he snorts so suddenly it sounds like a sneeze. “What a pair,” he mutters after he gathers himself, and now Keith gets it. He grabs the puppy back and stands, tucking it under one arm.

“If you mean we’re both strong and ferocious and smart, you’re right.”

Shiro cocks his head at the two of them. “Well, there’s that, but I think it’s more the hair. Are you going to bring him to town today?”

It’s been a good few weeks. Shiro and he spar in the mornings more days than not, and now some of the guards wave at him when he’s walking by or smile, at least. Better than hate and better than terror, so Keith takes it for what it is, even if they wouldn’t dare treat Shiro with the same casual regard.

The friendliness stops at the palace gates.

“...Do you think it’s safe for him?” Keith asks, not sure how to word it without letting his fears get the better of him.

All the heat is gone now, and he can’t imagine bringing anything so small and precious to a battle, which is what this day has become in his mind. Already his blood is thudding with that heavy-slow cadence he trained himself into over years. Measured breaths, a kind of peripheral awareness—he could name every exit in the room now, and a dozen other ways out.

Shiro’s hand under his chin is a shock. “Keith. Look at me.” He raises Keith’s head until he’s looking Shiro in the eye, less than a foot away, gaze warm and calm and so sure. “It’s safe. Nothing is going to happen.”

Keith almost believes him.

 

* * *

 

Before the festival, a run of good days line up, one after the other, like a string of pearls in perfect sequence.

Shiro gets a box of them in the first days of the celebrations, a gift from some small coast town brought to the city as tribute in a box lined with black down. Shiro explains how on the coast they dive into the sea, pry the shells off rock, crack them open to find these inside. Keith tries to imagine the sea that could give birth to something so perfect and hopes that one day Shiro will take him to it. It seems like a certainty and a good one. Those used to be rare, but now they start dropping at his feet, more every day. Certainties as vast and sure as spring coming and as small and lucky as a puppy wiggling between them in bed at night. A hundred good things.

The winter festival isn't one of them.

It still has its perks. The festival sees the streets lined in ribbons that hang heavy with ice, trees done up with baubles, and the entire palace draped in branches, filled with plats of delicacies that grab even Keith, and every mantle in the place set with glittering confections of spun glass, figures of deer and birds and mythical things. He hasn’t broken one yet, but only by pure luck.

The festival also brings the concept of biscuits which are new entirely.

“Maybe they call them something different where you’re from?” Allura offers. She offered to be part of his escort to the festivities, in lieu of Shiro, who had some earlier obligation he wanted to spare Keith.

Keith shakes his head and pauses by a side table where someone’s set a silver platter full of white biscuits with little bleeding hearts of jelly at their center. He shoves one in his mouth and tries to imagine Antok or Kolivan hunched over a worktable in the kitchens, aprons on, adding lines of sugar to a little pastry, or mixing up dough, and almost chokes on crumbs.

“If you eat too many of those, you’ll get fat,” Lance mutters from behind. These are rolled in sugar, too, and crunch in his mouth before they melt like butter with the jelly. He could eat the whole platter himself, but maybe he’ll have them brought back to the rooms to share with Shiro.

“So?”

“Well—” Lance waves his hand at him, “—but you won’t fit your armor,” he finishes, only half his heart in the insult and then rolls his eyes.  

Keith shrugs. _What armor?_ he wants to ask. The piece stretches across his chest and over his shoulders, but it’s for decoration—it could stop a sword, maybe, but not an arrow, and neither if someone really meant it. Everything on him is decoration except for the knife, and no one can see that. Someone thought putting him in white to match Shiro would be a good idea, but the color doesn’t quite suit him. The woman who fitted it to him told him with a laugh to try not to stain it, but the words instilled a bone-deep fear and sureness in him that before the day is out, he’s going to have ruined it somehow.

All the day requires of him is walking around, smiling, and not breaking anything. He can manage that much. “The festival… It’s about gifts, right?”

Allura glances back at him. “Did Shiro explain it?”

He tried. He tried, and then he’d asked about what winter celebrations the Galra have, and Keith described the nearest equivalent, which is exactly the same but instead of gifts, it’s about food, and instead of being _given,_ it’s more set on a communal table and fought over—and it’s not done in winter, so it’s not quite a winter celebration at all. Shiro had laughed then, and it was the private laugh he keeps between them, a quiet thing that wrinkles his nose and makes him sound ten years younger than he is.

Almost every word he’d explained about the festival had gone in one ear and out the other at that moment.

“Should I have gotten him something?”

Hunk shrugs but Allura shakes her head. “No. It won’t be expected of you.”

“But—”

“Keith. Try to enjoy yourself. That’s enough.”

“...You sound like Shiro.”

Allura picks at her dress. “I'll take that as a compliment,” she says, but Keith wasn't aware it could be anything else.

Be happy. Relax. Take your time. They couldn't have found someone less suited to the task.

The exposure will be good for him. That’s the thinking. He hasn’t had a public appearance since the wedding and this—seeing them both happy and hale will be good. The people have had a winter to calm, a winter to welcome back lovers and brothers and sisters and children gone to war, a winter to forget their anger. That’s the hope, at least.

Outside the palace gates, the streets are less manicured but more lively. More guards fall in with them on the way down and Keith is immensely glad he decided to leave the puppy in the stables with its mother. His nerves are fraying just from the sheer mass of people.

The point of excitement, for better or worse, is Shiro and he’s already there; Keith earns a few stares of his own on the way, but he hasn’t done anything interesting like kill Shiro in his sleep or burn down the palace, so no one is too invested in his presence. The crowd thickens toward the square where the main festivities are set to take place and so do the decorations. Stands are set up along every street. It’s the banquet table at the party all over again. This is what a nation with a sea trade has to offer. When they finally spot Shiro, he’s at the center of a throng of people, some of which Keith recognizes with a creeping dread.

The generals will always hate him. He’s an inconvenient presence, but a convenient bogeyman. Keith’s childhood wasn’t overflowing with fairy stories and books of tales about princes, but he’s read enough to know what they see him as. He’s the evil queen in the story, tempting their king away from everything that’s good and right, and never mind that the worst of Keith’s agenda is Shiro getting a full night’s sleep and, sometimes, seeing how much mud he can get in that perfect, pale hair.

Some grudges run too deep and this war made grudges like monoliths of iron.

He makes himself take a deep breath, and another, and then lets Lance and Hunk push through the group for him, making a clear path to Shiro’s side. Other guards are stationed around the square, conspicuous in white—but no one more so than Shiro.

With his crown on, he looks so much the part. Keith wants to reach up and resettle his own on his brow, but he’ll only mess it up, and Allura already fixed it for him twice on the way.

“You made it,” Shiro says when Keith approaches and then pulls him in for a one-armed hug, as if it’s been days and not hours since they saw each other. As if there was anywhere else to be. As if Shiro hadn't spent an hour in bed the night before spinning descriptions and bribing him with the promise of delicacies that put the palace cookies to shame. _That_ Keith remembers.

With the niceties taken care of, Shiro is all his. Only three generals are in attendance and while Iverson's face is in its usual rictus of anger, Keith is beginning to think that's just how he looks, which is fine. Keith’s not sure how to apologize for taking a man’s eye anyway. Holt even smiles at him once. Maybe Matt's been putting in a good word since Keith taught him how to sweep a leg without falling over.

After greetings, Allura steps in with all the light small talk Keith will never know how to make, and he realizes he owes her a hundredth favor for it as she leads them away. Shiro keeps his arm around Keith's shoulder as he starts taking him around from stand to stand. For once, Keith isn't the center of attention. More than a few stares come his way, but it's hard to tell if they're looking at him or Shiro, so he tells himself it’s the latter and has sympathy—but Shiro doesn’t need it. This is the king is in his element.

Delight radiates off of him, so bright that it makes people smile and redden by proximity. He wondered how a line soldier became a king, but in moments like this, the only wonder is that he wasn’t born into it.

They go from a woman selling tinctures in little bottles to a young couple selling bread baked into shapes of animals, and then to a man selling jewels on chains. Shiro holds one the color of the sea up to Keith’s eyes with a grin and Keith bats his hand away, embarrassed, but Shiro is unfazed, his attention already grabbed by the next table of goods.

“Look—”

It’s another table of little rocks, but these are in jars and oddly colored, bizarre. “What is that?”

Shiro laughs. “It’s chocolate. You—” He turns and frowns. “Wait, you’ve never had chocolate?”

Keith squints at him and then at the shelves and jars, all the brown bits, striped and crusted over with what must be sugar. “Chocolate?”

Shiro bows his head and steadies himself against on the table while the man behind the counter who had been giving them a polite amount of disinterested distance—or avoiding Keith—comes closer, watching Shiro with the same look Keith is now: a kind of mild horror. “I can’t believe it,” he’s muttering. “This is the saddest I’ve ever been.”

“What? What’s chocolate?”

Now the shopkeeper is staring at Keith like he’s the weird one. Shiro buys two pieces for each of them and then watches Keith with an almost animal intent as he urges him to take a bite. “Good?” he asks once Keith’s had a moment to chew.

It’s the best thing he’s ever eaten, but Keith only nods and tries to lick his lips without being obvious about it. They’re going to chap in the cold and it’s not a thing that bothered him before, but now he has to stand next to Shiro and pretend they’re at least the same species.

“Do you want my cloak?” Shiro offers when he sees Keith shiver.

Keith left his hanging over a chair; the red was too conspicuous against the white. “No. It’s fine.”

“You can't tell me you're not a little cold.”

Keith ignores him and picks up a bag of some chocolate that's striped in purple and gold and tries to decide if it's too much to ask for. “I'm not.” He is, actually, almost frozen to the bone, but he can’t admit it that easy.

He doesn’t have to. Shiro pulls off his white-on-white cloak with its ridiculous mantle of white fur and drapes it around Keith without waiting for an argument. It swamps him completely. The hem he pried out of the puppy’s mouth that morning drags on the mud and ice and the fur puffs up around his face, making him feel like a chicken with ruffled feathers. He gazes up at Shiro with the darkest look he can muster.

Shiro cocks his head and gazes at him critically, an expression that cracks bit by bit, and then breaks. He laughs. “I'm sorry. The celebration only goes until nightfall.” The sun is defiant, bright against the clear blue sky, and it’s ridiculous that it can be so cold _and_ so bright. Shiro steps away. “Actually, speaking of giving, I have something for you.”

Of course. Of course he does, and Keith has nothing in return. Shiro gestures to someone and Keith doesn’t have time to draw a breath before a stable hand he recognizes appears, leading a red bay horse he doesn’t from across the square.

“What…?”

Shiro pushes him, hand at the small of his back. It's beautiful, even shaggy still with its winter coat, gleaming in the sun. It tosses its head when Keith takes an involuntary step forward at Shiro’s urging, and then its gusting a breath into his space, nose like velvet in his hands, eyes are pale as the snow around them. He doesn't realize he's grinning until he turns back to Shiro and sees the expression reflected on his face—pure joy.

“He’s beautiful,” Keith whispers.

Shiro steps up beside him. “She, I think. Still needs some breaking in, but I thought you’d be up to the task.” Shiro offers him a hand up but Keith rolls his eyes and pulls himself up on her back, and then takes a moment for himself to revel in the feeling of being on horseback again. He taps her forward and into a trot to take a turn around the square. Up there, all the stares look silly and he can't remember foot a moment why it ever got to him.

She’s rides like a dream, gait butter-smooth. Not a war horse like Shiro’s Black, but nimble, made for speed and endurance. Shiro’s eyes follow their progress around, the only gaze he feels the weight of, as warm as the cloak around his shoulders.

After the second pass, they pull up next to Shiro. This time when he offers his hand, he takes it—a strategic error, because when he dismounts, they're chest to chest for a moment. Shiro is heat incarnate. He's the warmest thing in this city.

Keith pulls himself away. “Thank you.” He gives the words as much weight as he can because that's all he has left to give, and this gift was more than the cost and care of finding the horse. Shiro gave up something for it. “I thought I wasn’t allowed a horse?” he asks, not sure he wants to know the answer. The agreement was clear on Keith and his access to freedom and this gift is the heart and definition of it.

Shiro rolls his shoulder. “I don’t care.”

He should, Keith thinks, but instead he asks, “Would you go for a ride with me later?” In for a penny, in for a pound. “Just around the grounds,” he adds, to keep some facade of compliance.

“I would love to,” Shiro says, looping their arms.

Keith lets himself lean into Shiro’s shoulder. He's solid muscle, but still too thin for it. With his clothes off, he looks carved out of hard rock. He could stand to gain a pound or a dozen.

“You know, I spent a month picking her out,” he mutters as they watch the groom lead her away again. “You’re the first person she’s looked at twice. She would kill me for a single oat.”

Keith leans into him an inch more. “A woman after my own heart. Thank you,” he repeats, “No one’s ever given me a gift like that before.”

The sword is the closest it comes, but that was passed down mother to child, as much duty as a present, even if it was as unexpected.

Shiro pauses and looks down at him, eyebrows up in sympathy, the same look he uses on the puppy. “Keith…”

“Really, it’s okay,” Keith says.

“I was going to say you don’t even have winter, so—”

Keith rolls his eyes and drops his arm. There’s a stand across the way with hot pies that won’t sass him. He buys two and crunches into one with both hands, realizing only after the first bite that he never got more than half a biscuit for breakfast. It has gravy and something sweet that sticks to his teeth, like figs.

“The food here is so sweet,” he tries to say around the mouthful when Shiro follows him, though it comes out garbled. He gives the second pie to Shiro, who eats it in two horrifying bites and then eyes the second half of Keith’s pie with the most innocent look. Keith hands it over, shaking his head as Shiro takes it and pops the entire thing in his mouth with a grin. On principle, Keith rolls his eyes, but heat burns through him at the tilt of Shiro’s smile as he licks the sap-sugar off his fingers.

He’d be blind and dumb not to notice Shiro’s looks, but he’s one of a few thousand in that regard, so he shoves the heat away and moves off.

The next stall is draped with ribbons of every color and pattern, some that sparkle even brighter than the ice on the buildings around them. Keith distracts himself trying to pick something for Allura and Rommelle as a thank you. Aside from the guards and occasionally the cooks who give him scraps for the puppy, they’re the two friendliest faces in the castle, and the two he least deserves friendship from.

Allura likes blue, but there's a green one that would suit her, too, lined with stitched snowdrops, and one beside it with roses that Romelle might like. Better late than never to gift giving. Shiro would buy it for him if asked.

“See something you want?” Shiro asks from behind him. He reaches over Keith's shoulder to a row he didn't notice and pulls out a wide band of lace done in red. It's fine work. The blank spaces between the embroidered threads are shaped like roses, white against red the way his hand shows through the stitching.

Keith wonders how long it took to make, and then tries to imagine the cost and can't.

“No?” Shiro asks, voice light. “You're right. It's the wrong shade. Not your color.” He can't see Shiro's eyes, but he can imagine the look in them, can feel the warmth of that body against his back through the cloak and can feel himself heat again in turn.

“I was going to get something for the Princess.” He points to the ribbon he was looking at, and then to the pink. Behind him, he hears Shiro take a breath and hold it for a moment.

“I think she would love it,” he says, and then asks, “Do you like her?” The question is in the same light tone; Keith almost says yes, but pauses first, because something about the tone is off. “If you do, there are arrangements we can make—” he starts, but now Keith can hear how tight his voice is.

Keith spins to face him, heart like thunder in his chest. “No. No, she’s a friend. Just a friend.” Keith finally lets himself tear his bangs out of his eyes, Allura’s fine hair dressing be damned, because he needs to look Shiro in the eye for this. “You can't honestly think that there’s anyone else…” He doesn’t know how to finish it. There is no one else, compared to Shiro. Not in this city, not in this country, not in any place he knows. No person like him exists, and the only thing he can’t figure out is if that’s the reason why he occupies so much of Keith’s mind, or if it’s a personal failing. If anyone would fall for him, or if this flaw is uniquely his.

 _I gave up a war for you, and you still think I would look at someone else?_ He can’t ask that.

Shiro is staring down at him now, confusion in his gaze, mouth half open on a question of his own, but both of them stalled at the same point.

But before any words can trip out of his mouth, fodder for regret, the hair rises on the back of Keith’s neck, a drop of cold water down his spine.

Once, the army was caught out in the open in a bad storm. It rolled across landscape, roaring and cracking as it went, without warning. The best they could do was throw up a few tents, but the storm blew through most of them as if it was wrath itself and they had no defense for that. All they could do was sit and watch and wait and hope it passed quickly. It did, but not before lightning struck at the edges of the slap-dash camp. It took out a tent and the men inside it. If the Galra were a more superstitious people, they might have taken it as a bad omen, but at the time it was nothing more than a footnote.

He can still remember the smell of the air before the strike. Almost metallic, like standing in a forge. He can remember the way it stuck his hair up. Just like this.

Everything slows down in that moment. The sound of the square fades into the background and Shiro's words go with it. Keith can see his mouth moving suddenly, shaping his name, but over his shoulder, there's a glint of metal from a high window.

The sun glinting off the head of an arrow, in the most familiar way.

The first shot misses its mark. It misses because Keith blocks it. He shoves Shiro away with a frantic, sudden strength, hears him go careening into the stand of ribbons, hears jars falling and shattering, but the sound is muffled against the thud of his heart, and then comes the pop of leather as the bolt sinks through the shoulder of his armor and into the nape of his neck. Pain comes fast, but this he knows how to deal with, and the shine of another arrowhead is already winking at him from the distant window.

If he had time to grab someone else’s sword, he might, but the guards are too slow. They’re still staring, some helping Shiro up and positioning themselves in front of the king, trying to figure out where to turn. Someone starts screaming, and then there are more people yelling. Keith pushes it all away as the next arrow looses.

He already has his mother’s blade in his hand, ripped free from its hidden scabbard. The little flash as it transforms in his hands makes the screams around them start in earnest, and now even their guard is yelling. Keith swings at the arrow with a one-handed grip and flinches as it shatters on the blade, splinters whipping past his face, slicing along his cheek.

There won’t be a third. The assassin overreaches and now Keith can see the gleam off the man’s bow, off the gauntlet that covers the arm he’s using to draw. Keith holds his breath, aims, and throws.

He’s months out of practice, but the sword still finds its mark. The man lurches forward and topples out of the window, landing in a heap across the square. The sound his body makes when it hits the cobblestone street is sickening, even from afar. Keith is already moving toward it. No one is fast enough to stop him, but no one here would try.

If they follow, he doesn’t notice. All his gaze is tunneled in on the sword and the body, watching for movement.

It’s still. An ugly heap, face the only undamaged part of the man. Keith steps forward and grips his blade, rips it free in one clear tear. Somehow, the sound of is the worst part—worse, even than the spray of blood that streaks across Keith’s face. He flicks some of the blood off and makes to poke at the body, to see if it’s as lifeless as it seems, but then there’s a hand on his shoulder.

Shiro turns him with a grip like iron and all the sound comes rushing back. “You—” he starts, but Keith cuts him off, turning to the guard that are still running up to them.

“Get him inside,” he orders.

No one moves. Keith turns to them fully, teeth already forming around a meaner command, but Lance and Hunk are staring at him, and then their gaze shifts to the body at Keith’s feet. Their faces go from slack horror to recognition. Shiro’s gaze follows theirs, and soon the other guards are staring at the man, too, like he’s a ghost.

The man is familiar. Faintly, the shape of his jaw and the curve of his nose ring a bell This is a face Keith has seen before and recently, but he hasn’t left the palace grounds in months, so it can’t be, he thinks, until his memory conjures a faint image of the man in white, opening doors for him, standing in corners, omnipresent and never more than a blank face.

“Why…” He realizes the answer even as he voices the question, the knowledge settling over him like a shroud. This was one of Shiro’s guards. Matt’s first partner. A friend.

He feels eyes on him. Shiro’s, too. Why would a guard want to kill the king? The spaces between the lines fill themselves in as he feels the weight of more gazes, and Shiro’s most of all. He shouldn’t be out in the open like this still. Keith turns to yell at him to get inside again, but the order dies in his throat when he sees the expression on his face.

Shiro’s deep gaze is filled with horror, and beyond him, more faces to match.

A thousand pairs of eyes staring at him now, at the spectacle he's made of himself. It feels like the day of the marriage, but now he can feel wet warmth dripping down his cheek, seeping under his ornamental armor, running down his chest and side and soaking the white cloth in red. Red to match the name they gave him. Shiro’s eyes flicker to arrow in his shoulder and then to the sword in his hand, all of it red. Every bit of him, red.

A man so hated, even the king’s own guard would turn to hate him. He stains everything he touches.

“We need to get this seen to,” Shiro murmurs, reaching out to him. His hand is shaking.

Keith pushes him off, harder than he means to. He can’t meet anyone’s eyes, but there’s nowhere to look that isn’t faces. Nowhere but down, and then he sees the blood on the snow and across his armor, stain spreading across his shoulder. The hem of Shiro’s cloak is turning pink with it.

Shiro reaches out again and Keith slaps his hand away without letting himself think about it, but Shiro catches his hand and grips it.

“You’re going to the infirmary. Now.”

In reply, Keith pulls his hand free and steps away. He reaches up unclasps the cloak, lets it fall off his shoulders, and then he grips the arrow as tight as he can and pulls. It tears free from flesh and leather and cloth with another pop.  Shiro makes a pained sound, like the arrow was buried in him instead. Someone gasps.

It has white fletching and the head is forged to a wicked point that’s coated in a film of red. Their arrows always looked more for show than for war, but they killed the same as any other.

Thoughts come to him one after another, in cadence with the throb of pain in his shoulder and the drip of blood down his armor. He’s lucky it only hit muscle. He’s lucky he was wearing armor at all. He’s lucky he saw it coming.

And: luck is nothing. Luck is worthless.

 

* * *

 

The search runs until nightfall, but Keith doesn’t participate. Lance and Hunk try to drag him to the infirmary, but he doesn’t want to be gawked at or touched or fussed over or feared. Instead, he goes to their rooms and dismisses Lance and Hunk to look after Shiro. No one is going to attack Keith in the bathroom and he’s already taken an arrow. Everything else seems like an afterthought.

Under the armor, he’s a wreck. The blood ruins three towels in a row, but there’s no deeper wound. The head of the arrow barely went into his shoulder at all; he bandages what’s left and then throws on the only piece of clothing in the room that feels right. It’s one of Shiro’s undershirts, oversize on him. He has to pull it over his head one-armed and then pull his other arm through, wincing at the pull against the puncture wound with a cry that would be embarrassing for anyone else to hear.

He’s the only one there.

Somehow, he’d forgotten. Shiro is as smart in battle as he ever was, and as fierce. The bells ring all afternoon. He can hear them, distant, watching the sun arcing low over the city. He tracks its progress in the shadows across the floor of their room and imagine he can hear the march of the guard's feet through the streets and up the wood stairs of the would-be assassin's home, digging out the conspiracy by root and bloody stem. Shiro doesn't make it back until the evening.

“You…” he starts when he walks in, but then pauses, and says in a softer voice, “I’ve been looking for you.”

His crown is still on. Keith's is in the washroom, set by the tub, next to the ruined, red pile of his armor and clothes and the threads he pulled from the wound before he wrapped it in strips cut from his white shirt and pants. He’s never going to wear white again.

“I've been here.” Shiro doesn’t reply. He’s busy, ripping his one glove off with his teeth, staring at nothing in the middle-distance. “What happened?” Keith asks.

“It’s taken care of,” he replies, gaze falling to Keith’s shoulder where the bandage is peeking out under the borrowed shirt and darkening.  

“They’re—”

“Taken care of,” Shiro punctuates with a hard tone and a glance that doesn’t explain or allow for argument. _Taken care of._ Dead. Keith wonders if he saw to it himself and has the sudden image of Shiro, sword in hand, bringing it down on those who used to protect him for Keith’s honor. His clothes are still white. Perfect white. And his cloak is back around his shoulders. The only mark on him is Keith’s blood spattered on the fur, from the cut on his cheek. He didn’t bother to bandage that.

Shiro stills suddenly and then looks him over again, retracing the bandage under the borrowed shirt and how it’s stained with blood and poorly tied. “I told you to go to the infirmary. Why wasn’t this treated?” He steps close and reaches out and, for the third time in a day, Keith pushes him away.

“Don’t touch me.”

“Keith—”

“Don’t. Don’t say my name like that.”

Shiro stares at him, loss crowning his brow. “I thought we were past this.”

They were. Keith was. With a certainty that's been dawning for days, he knows what this ache is, knows why those moments before sleep when they trade stories are the best parts of his day, and what it means to take a blow that was meant to kill and to count it as a triumph that it bit him instead. “We’ll never be past it. They hate me. They hate you because of me. They want you _dead_ because of me. I can't—I can’t fix this.” His grip on the sheets is death-like, a rictus of some emotion he can’t put a name too, has never felt before. Not even lying in the mud at the point of Shiro’s blade felt like this.

It’s not himself he’s scared for. It’s Shiro. It’s for this life, because this life is something good and he’d thought no one could take it from him. A warm bed, a warm smile, someone who wants him for more than his sword. Simple, precious things, falling away from him one by one.

“Did you see their faces?” Keith asks, heart so high in his chest it feels like it’ll break it if he speaks too fast. “They're terrified of me.”

Shiro takes a seat on the edge of the bed, feet away, as if Keith might burst into flames and take the bed with him if he moves any closer. Keith feels like he might.

“They were terrified for you. You had an arrow sticking out of your shoulder.” But they both know that's only half of it, at best. “ _I_ was terrified.”

There's the truth. There's the ruin. A thousand people saw him take an arrow, conjure a sword, kill a man cold, but Shiro saw a friend. He could make a friend out of anything.

If the arrow had hit higher and to the right, or if he'd won his argument about not wearing the gaudy armor, the blow would have been fatal, and that, he realizes with a perfect clarity, was the better option. An uglier clean up, but the treaty would stand, and who would be left to complain about Shiro’s poor decision to keep him alive with him cold in the ground? Or better, still: if it had happened all those months before. A sword in his neck, a clean punctuation to a messy war.

Keith is the mess. He drags it behind him now everywhere he goes, like someone spilling ink across one of Allura’s books, red running rampant over a page penned in perfect black-on-white.

He can't breathe. “I’m ruining everything.” His voice is shaking and his mouth is dry. “It really…” He swallows and tries to force into his lungs. “It really would have been better if I had died.”

If he could laugh, he would, but then Shiro reaches out one more time, traces his fingers over the edge of red that's blossoming through the bandage on Keith's shoulder, the ache there returning in full force at the reminder, and something in Keith snaps at the touch. Something in him breaks and scatters. Shiro will get blood on him. Everything in this place is white. Everything—but their rooms are warm and Shiro’s touch is warm and even here, Keith brings ruin.

He grabs the outstretched hand before it can make contact and uses the grip to overbalance Shiro, shoves him back on the bed and then straddles him, grip still like iron, using his weight to hold him there, though Shiro goes slack with no more protest than a soft sound of surprise.

“Why? Why didn't you kill me?”

He would have been better off with Keith in a grave or his head on a spike, some bloody testament to victory, nothing more than a bad memory. Maybe that's why he's not—maybe that’s why Shiro couldn’t kill him. There was no in-between, no option that didn’t end in gore, but even then, this man won't use him properly. He’s never asked Keith for anything. Every loss he took to keep this prize, and not one makes sense.

Shiro closes his eyes and pulls his hand from Keith’s grip, rests it on Keith's bare thigh. When he speaks, it’s with resignation. “If we’d killed you, would your people have ever stopped? Your generals? ...Your mother?” Keith can’t stop his intake of surprise, but before he can deny it, Shiro keeps going, twisting the knife he doesn’t know he holds, the grip on Keith’s thigh tightening with his voice. “We knew. They said you wouldn't last more than a year. I know they were wrong about that, but still—they wanted you gone.”  His thumb is pressed now to the inside of Keith’s thigh, so hard it's going to leave a bruise, and still Shiro won't look at him. His gaze is off-center, half-lidded, staring at nothing as Keith reels.

This was the less efficient solution, and Shiro knows it. The less expedient one. Better to cut off the head of the snake, let what's left of the Galra go on wriggling to be killed at their leisure.

“So…” He swallows again and wishes he could hide his face in Shiro’s chest. “So I'm just an accident? Do you want me to be grateful?”

The hand on his thigh relents and raises to his shoulder, tracing over the bandage, and then to his cheek. “No. I want you to be alive. That's all I've wanted,” Shiro says, voice rough but light, something wounded hiding in it, as if he's the one that took Keith’s blade that afternoon. “You always think I have this figured out. You think I have a plan—I don't. You were the plan.”

Keith's stomach seizes up. “That's a shitty plan.” His voice is shaking, in fear or anger. “Was it worth it?”

Shiro takes a hard breath, and then pushes it out like a laugh, like one he might have given if the war had gone the other way, if Keith had him now in chains, hanging on a wall, picking answers out of his flesh. It sounds like pain. Slowly, and somehow still by surprise, he slides his hand from Keith’s face and buries it in his hair. He rises off the bed and pulls toward him. Keith meets him in the middle without meaning to.

It's their second kiss, but it feels like the first. It feels like the first of everything.

This kiss is longer than the one in the great hall and harder, too. It goes for seconds with interludes for breath. As time drags and frays and unravels behind him, Keith realizes he's making little sounds he doesn't mean to and Shiro's breath has gone hot and hard between them. Keith's weight is settled against his, too heavy, the blankets bunched up between them as close suddenly isn't close enough.

“Yes,” Shiro breathes against his neck, an answer to a question Keith doesn’t remember asking now, a word of praise, a syllable Keith almost misses. “I love you.”

Shiro breathes the words against his neck and then presses a bite to his skin and follows it with a brush of his lips. Keith tries to reply, but his mouth preempts him with another sound, this one from his chest and wordless and rough and deep.

At the sound of it, Shiro pushes up against him. He's hard through the cloth of his thin pants and Keith has nothing between him and that.

“I’ve loved you for years,” Shiro says against his ear, impossibly. “From the start.”

“Please,” Keith says, not sure what he’s asking. He wants to ask why, or how, but he doesn’t want an answer more than he wants this right now. His hands are clenched uselessly in the sheets, but he forces them free and sets them where they'll do the most good: one digging into the fabric over Shiro's spine, to feel the muscle and bone and breath under it, the raw strength of Shiro, and the other he digs into the soft hair at the back of Shiro’s neck, to hold him there, to keep his mouth hovering above bare skin.

Shiro's hand slides down his back, dips under the cloth of the nightshirt, and then back up, goosebumps rising in the wake of his touch.

Keith has never been above begging. “Please,” he repeats.

Shiro has never been above giving him everything.

 

* * *

 

It feels like the aftermath of a fight, but in places a spar never made him ache.

He shifts his legs under the sheets and furs and feels, somehow, sated. As if he's eaten a full meal and had a full night's rest, which he hasn't. His last meal was at the festival. Even with Shiro naked and warm and right there beside him, Keith's chest cinches at the memory of the day before. He twines their fingers in lieu of anything more intimate and Shiro gusts out a breath between them in the heat under the blankets.

“Keith,” he murmurs, like a summons, still mostly asleep. Keith moves closer so that the next time he says it, he can feel his name brush over his skin.

He wants to pull Shiro over him, feel his weight, beg him to do it again. He wants to live in this bed now, just the two of them. It would be a perfect life. Let the city burn down around them, let the responsibility fall on someone else’s shoulders. No. Shiro might give him that life if he asked. He might leave this all behind for Keith. His leg is wrapped up with Keith’s under the sheets, but Keith dislodges it carefully.

He’s better than that. They both are.  

Shiro makes another sound and flinches. “Go back to sleep,” Keith tells him and slips from the bed.

None of the clothes they gave him are plain, none made for travel, but he finds something passable in shades of grey and black, with only a bit of gold lining the shoulders and plated over the buttons and hooks that hold it all together. He shoves the red cloak in a bag that he throws over his unbandaged shoulder. The snow is starting to melt in earnest, but the hills will still be cold at this time of the day.

Before he goes, he leans over the bed and presses a kiss to Shiro’s cheek, and then to his lips when his head turns. “I love you,” he says.

Shiro is still too deep in his dreams to reply.

Outside the door, the guards he dismissed the day before are back—Hunk and Lance, the eternal two, bags under their eyes from the late night and the early morning, and others Keith doesn’t recognize but who Shiro must trust with their lives.

“You’re up?” Hunk asks. “I didn’t think...” He trails off. His face red, a smile at the corner of his lips—but then he sees the bag in Keith’s hand. All of them do.

Keith waits for the darkening of their gazes, but it doesn’t come. “Stay with him,” Keith orders.

“Where are you going?” Lance asks.

If he tells them, they’ll tell the king. That defeats the purpose. He doesn’t know what to say, so he shakes his head and fingers the hilt of the dagger that’s hooked into his belt, a nervous gesture. Hunk’s eyes fall to it. “What should we tell him?”

“...Stay with him,” Keith says again, less an order this time, more softly. It’s almost an apology.

 

* * *

 

He leaves by the front doors. No guards stop him, which is a surprise. He can’t read the look on their faces anymore, so he doesn’t try. By the shortest path, he walks to the stables and saddles the red mare that’s stalled beside Shiro’s horse now. The grooms are still asleep. Dawn won’t be for hours. He’s grateful for it, even as he tries to figure out how to lift a saddle on his own, one-armed. He manages it, in the end, with only a little pain.

Before he goes, he leans over the gate to the stall where the puppies are resting and lifts out the nameless puppy to scratch its ears and breath the clean, sweet smell of its breath and fur. It yips at him when he puts it back and somehow, leaving him is as hard as leaving Shiro’s bed.

The dull ache in his shoulder is a match for the one in his chest as he rides out of the palace gates and then through the city, and then beyond.  He turns the sun to his back and rides west, until the path starts to weave between the hills. The quiet is perfect—nothing follows him but the sound of the horse’s hooves striking frozen dirt, and the sound of their breath steaming in the cold air.

In his head, he tries to calculate how long it’s been since he was out for a ride on his own and can’t remember. Years, maybe. It was his favorite pastime as a kid—finding some quiet place in the desert to set up camp and watch the sunset and then the sunrise. He misses the open spaces of home, the unbroken horizon, the clean, hot air rising off the rock around him.

Nothing like that exists here, but he gets as close as he can.

The journey takes the better part of two hours, marked by the slow brightening of the sky. He makes it to the crest of the hills he could see from the castle while it’s still dark, the sky starting to brighten behind the fine spires of the palace, going from yellow on the horizon to a kind of russet orange, and then to purple and pale blue.

Sunrises aren’t hard to come by in the palace. A dozen balconies are set into the walls that face east, a dozen quiet, private places to watch the sky brighten inch by inch. This is better. It looks so small from a distance. He imagines he can pick out their window, but it’s all one dark blue splotch against the sky.

If he wanted, he could ride for days, straight on to the ocean, see Sanda’s ships and the place where they gather pearls. Or he could keep riding west and beat a path toward home. He pulls the blade off his hip and lets it change, turns it over in the sun, admiring the violet gleam of the metal. It has the same sub-metallic luster as his mother’s hair—the one thing about her he inherited where height and size failed. The blade is the last piece of his home, but more: the last piece of his family.

He stabs it in the dirt by his foot and scrubs his hands over his face and through his hair, fighting the sting at the corner of his eyes at the thought of giving it up.

Family is more precious than pearls, more precious than all his wedding gifts, more precious than the blade itself. That’s what the Galra were to him. He flattered himself that it was mutual. You fight better if you’re fighting for family. It’s what made them strong.

Letting go of them isn’t an option. Family is family, but then, there’s no law that says he can only have one. Shiro could be a family, too; small and whole and perfect. A husband and a friend. A lover and a brother. The sense memory of a mouth on his neck and chest and lower coming back in full and making his face go red half with wanting and half with sorrow.

Now, he really is crying. He blinks and then pulls the cloak out of the bag—the only thing he kept, in the end, and gathers it in his arms, presses his face to the cool cloth. It smells faintly of their rooms, of a wood fire and herbs they sometimes toss in on top in the fireplace, and of something else clean. Shiro. The night before, when he came back to the room, he tossed his cloak and gloves and crown over the back of the same chair. That's why it smells like him.

Beside him, the dagger transforms again, unbidden. It flares against the snow for a moment, brighter than the sun before him, brighter than anything he’s seen in months.

If he leaves, he's free. If he leaves, the fight is over. Staying means every day is going to be a battle. People will hate him, and they’ll hate Shiro because of him for the rest of their lives.

It’s good, then, that this is the one fight he doesn’t know how to walk away from.

 

* * *

 

He half expects to be grabbed as soon as he enters the city, but the guards at the gate only nod as he passes back on to the palace grounds. One waves. Keith returns it after a moment, trying not to show his shock, but realizes after a moment that it’s the boy he showed how to block two mornings ago while Shiro watched them, grin on his face.

It means no one called a search for him. It means he’s been gone most of a day and no one knows. It means Shiro let him go.

He leaves the horse with them and makes the rest of the way to the main doors on his own.

Every step back on the marble steps is like walking a precipice. The doors are already open. It must be a day for public audiences. Keith is never invited to those, but a part of him is defiant and glad he can show up to one now, even as his heart tears through his chest. The crowd in the hall quiets as soon as he steps into the room, his footsteps over-loud on the stone. They part for him, giving him a clear path up to the dais where the throne sits. The small group of people standing before him, begging some favor or wanting him to clear a dispute, scatter like leaves. It would be comical on any other day, but he can’t enjoy it.

This is a path he’s walked before, he realizes, and the feeling rising in his throat is different than the fear he felt that day. He’s never hurt someone in this way. He’s never loved someone in this way.

Shiro has never looked at him this way. Seated on the throne, face like the missing piece of one of the statues in the gallery. He doesn’t show surprise or anger or even, as Keith had hoped in the most distant and silly way, joy at his return.

The weight of his gaze steals Keith’s breath and courage, and then he’s there, staring up at what almost feels like a stranger. Keith blinks the tunnel out of his eyes and kneels. His voice sounds to his own ears like someone else’s, rough and faint, but still loud enough to fill the echoing silence in the hall. “I didn't get you anything for the festival,” he says. “So I wanted to give you this.”

He pulls the sword off his hip and offers it in his hands, palm up. It’s still transformed, the way it was the day before when he used it to kill a man, the way it has been since he decided on the hillside, in the light of the sunrise, to give it up. It’s as if it’s been waiting.

The room is so quiet in that moment, it feels like his own breath is the loudest sound in the room. Everyone will be able to hear, he thinks with a panic. Every person there will hear his breath and his heart beating out of his chest and the way his voice is shaking.

Shiro doesn’t move or reply. Keith bows his head and makes himself take one last breath, and then makes his best offer.

“I’ll fight your enemies for you. I’ll keep you safe. I’ll share your bed and keep you warm.” The first vows didn’t mean anything. These—these mean everything. He can feel it in his blood, in the blade that almost seems to vibrate in his hands, though his voice sounds rough and inadequate to the task, it’s all he has. “I’ll raise a family with you. I’ll protect this place and this kingdom and all these people. Please.” The last word wasn’t a piece of it when he thought of it in his head, but it’s the part he wants to repeat over and over. Not above begging. Never above begging. Not for this man. Instead, he raises the blade higher, desperate as the silence stretches.

“...What do you want?”

Shiro’s voice is level and soft. How many times he’s asked that. Keith has lost count, but now he has an answer. “You.”

The word falls between them in the silence, and then the sound of Shiro’s boots on the steps draw his gaze. His face is still unreadable, still, like the stone the hall is molded from. _This is it,_ Keith thinks. _You’ve finally gone too far._ But if Shiro wants his head, he can have it. All of Keith is his, however he wants it, wherever and whenever.

When he gets to the bottom and Keith has to crane his neck to look up at him, he bends and reaches for the hilt of the sword. Keith flinches—but Shiro has always been better than Keith at a good feint.

“I accept,” Shiro says, loud enough that it echoes through the silence of the hall and then bypasses the blade to take Keith’s wrist and pull him up. The grip is clumsy, the force of it too strong. Keith falls into him and realizes it’s on purpose when Shiro holds him there and kisses his temple and then his forehead, like a prayer. Maybe it is, because he pulls away then and whispers in a voice meant only for the two of them, “Why did you leave?”

“I needed to clear my head,” Keith murmurs. “And I wanted you to know I would come back.”

_I had to know I could._

When he raises Keith’s hand and turns him to the crowd, and to Keith’s eternal shock, they start cheering. It’s louder than the applause for the wedding, different altogether. Less a cheer of a victory and more a thing born from joy. It echoes in his ears for hours after.

 

* * *

 

It turns out saving a king is worth more points than marrying one. Taking an arrow for him, even better.

They start weaving stories about him. Now, the king is the one that seduced him rather than the other way around. The prince begged him for the honor, saw his face in battle and fell like a stone in water—and who wouldn’t? They say that for the Galra, the sword is a kind of bond, something unbreakable, something mystical.

If that’s why they trust him, he’ll take it. The truth isn’t any less damning. It’s more embarrassing, actually, Keith thinks as he loops his arms low around Shiro’s back in the quiet of their rooms a month later “Are you sure I can’t just go as your guard?”

There are too many celebrations here. Too much to celebrate. In the pit of his stomach, in the part of him he pretends doesn’t exist, he’s starting to enjoy it.

“You’re not a guard,” Shiro tells him, leaning back a little to cock his head and stare down at Keith. It’s still a lie. There haven’t been any more incidents, but Keith is braced for it every time they go into the city. The last time they went, the worst thing that happened was a man coming up to offer him a free pie and a slap on the shoulder for the arrow he took. It’s a theme. Some of the guards have asked to see the scar, too. Keith agreed the first few times, but then Shiro found out and Keith agreed to stop in exchange for not being forced to wear armor outside of their rooms.

“You’re a leader,” Shiro continues. Keith doesn’t point out that he can and will be both. “It’s just a celebration. You don’t have to talk to anyone you don’t want to.”

“I like talking to people. I just—”

Shiro cups his face in his hand maneuvers him into a kiss that’s heat and bite and not at all appropriate for two men who have to be in front of a hundred people in less than an hour. Something about lighting lanterns and admire flowers. Flowers on trees. They have that here. All the flowers in Keith’s kingdom are bound to the ground and plants with thorns, springing up between rocks for a week or two every spring. Shiro has agreed to see them one day and Keith plans to hold him to it, but now he wills himself still. It’s the hardest test he’s ever faced because Shiro’s mouth is ruin.

Shiro makes a small sound as Keith steps away. “Maybe we could cancel,” he offers.

“No. We’re going.”

“I can’t believe you’re not on my side,” Shiro mutters as they walk out.

Keith knocks their shoulders together and takes his hand. “I’m always on your side.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [[fic on twitter](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17200472/chapters/40444286)]
> 
> Thank you so much for reading!! I hope you enjoyed it. I'm still considering an epilogue or two and something from Shiro's POV, so this probably won't be the end, but for now: thank you again! This was one of my favorite fics to write and I still feel so lucky I got the chance to. And to meoqie: THANK YOU. Your patience with me and encouragement were undeserved and so greatly appreciated, and a very, very merry and belated sheithmas to you! Now I will return to the sea lol.
> 
> You can find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/arahir) and [pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.io/arahir)!


	5. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shiro falls five times.
>
>> “What’s with the clothes? Too good to fight?” 
>> 
>> “No,” the sergeant says, “but I wish.” 
>> 
>> As he says it, the prince turns, Shiro can see his face in full at last. It’s young, winsome, thin-cheeked and pointed—and covered in blood. So much of it that any one man would be dead for bleeding it. In his hand is a sword to match, long and thin and wicked, dripping with gore. He can’t be past sixteen.
>> 
>> “That’s him. Their little prince of horrors.”

1.

No one wants to go to war. Not really. Not once they get there.

Shiro wanted to be somewhere, though, like everyone else young and fresh. He wanted to serve, but he wanted to explore more. A ship’s captain or a trader, he dreamed for years—a traveler, an explorer. He envisioned himself charting new coasts, new courses between the stars by sea, salt spray and sun on his skin, wind in his hair.

Two out of three isn’t so bad, but here in the desert, the wind bites as much as the sun blisters. Storms come from nowhere and go as fast, coating everything in dust. Right now, he can feel it coating his skin, battling for chief annoyance with the slide of sweat down his back, under the heavy leather armor, making him wonder if the extra layer is worth it at all. The rock he’s hiding behind isn’t much cover—but there isn’t any better out here. Not a tree in sight, not for a day’s ride in any direction. No water, no food they know how to get at.

I should have gone into the navy, Shiro thinks for the umpteenth time and wipes his forehead, but that’s not where they needed men.

Altea died in a night and no logic mattered after that. Nothing but the front, overland, across the scrub and into the waste of sand and rock. That was two years ago—but only months since Shiro joined up.

Now the distant sounds of the fight are the only thing keeping him awake and tensed, even as he tries to catch his breath and force himself back onto the field. It’s not cowardice. He isn’t sure his legs are still working though.

“Oh fuck,” a man says as he ducks behind the same rock that’s been keeping Shiro company, kicking sand and dust as he comes. Shiro watches it settle of his boots dispassionately and then glances up at the man. The stripes on his shoulder are dirt-stained and scuffed; Shiro doesn’t recognize him, but his own sergeant is long gone. This one might as well do.

“Oh fuck, what? Sir?” All of this has been an _oh fuck,_ for days now. They should never have met the Galra in their own territory, on their own terms. Mistakes were made, but they weren’t Shiro’s. All he can do is pick up the pieces. Still—if the situation can get worse, he’d rather know how now than later.

The sergeant swallows hard and wipes his forehead, succeeding in doing nothing but making mud out of the sweat on his brow. “That—that’s him,” the man says, thumb gesturing over his shoulder. “That’s their prince.”

Shiro almost laughs. The look on the man’s face is comically serious, almost white under the week’s worth of accidental beard. “Their what?” He risks raising his head and there in the distance, behind the dust is one piece that doesn’t fit: a boy in utilitarian clothes, no helmet to mask his messy hair and pale face. Shiro has to double-take because they are more clothes than armor. He’s hard to make out behind his guard, which tower over him. The woman beside him looks as if she could carry him around on her shoulders. “What’s with the clothes? Too good to fight?”

“No,” the sergeant says, “but I wish.”

As he says it, the prince turns, Shiro can see his face in full at last. It’s young, winsome, thin-cheeked and pointed—and covered in blood. So much of it that any one man would be dead for bleeding it. In his hand is a sword to match, long and thin and wicked, dripping with gore. He can’t be past sixteen.

“That’s him. Their little prince of horrors.”

 

* * *

 

He came from nothing, they say. Not Zarkon’s, and not even related. That son was driven off long ago. Now the military controls the Galra hierarchy. They’re called Blades and they all dress the same, so you can’t know what to fear most. They all fight with the same ferocity anyway. Kolivan would be the natural successor in that line, but instead the Galra held a coronation and _this_ is what they put on the throne. A boy. He’s the son of one their recon generals, they say. At least, he looks exactly like her.

Shiro gathers these rumors not because he wants to but because they’re unavoidable. This is all the soldiers talk about around the campfire at night. A tall, thin woman with slicked back hair recounts being set upon by his troop in a night raid. An honorless attack, by any count. They downed trees over the escape route to box the troop in and then set on them like dogs.

_They are dogs,_ says another, and the whole camp laughs.

The prince’s eyes glow at night, say some. He drinks the blood he cuts out of the soldiers he kills. He can command the sword from afar, can conjure it from thin air with a thought—in your chest, in your neck. They’ve all seen it, or so they say. He can command the Galra with the same ease. Can turn to shadow, walk on air, make your own blade turn back on you. Witches and spirits. Ghosts and monsters. The kind of madness only a war can inspire in people.

Shiro can’t believe a word of it. The prince is small and young and still sweet-faced. Believing one story in ten would be a high order; Shiro opts for less. What he sees with his own eyes, he'll trust.

It’s his bad luck that he gets that chance not a month later.

 

* * *

 

Guard duty is no better or worse than any of the other dozen jobs men his rank can be assigned, so it takes it in stride.

The night is cool, at least. Better to guard then than under the beating sun. It’s almost pretty, the way the stars glitter over the desert, the way the moon lights up the columns of rock that spear from the hard-pack of the valley floor where they’ve camped out of necessity more than desire. At least, that’s how it is most nights.

This night is different. No moon, no breeze, only a stagnant heat that makes him feel that no matter what he takes off, it won’t be enough. They’ve already shed their armor. “Isn’t it supposed to get colder at night?” the boy on guard with him mutters, airing his shirt.

Shiro shrugs. “I guess.”

The boy opens his mouth to reply, expression so sour that Shiro can make it out even in the dark—but he never gets the chance.

His breath cuts out on the sound of something _whishing_ through the air and lodging fast in flesh. A now familiar sound. Shiro can make out by the starlight the silhouette of an arrow sticking out of his neck, fletching behind him, and then the sound of him sputtering blood fills the quiet. The boy falls to his knees as Shiro watches.

Shiro makes to shout, but the arrow came from behind. Camp is behind.

He drops and pulls the boy down with him, trying to stifle the blood though it’s already a lost battle. Later, he’ll mourn his own cowardice, but in that moment all he can muster is the sense to keep quiet and still and watch from the rise they were stationed on.

Soon, the sounds of shouting and fighting rise from the valley floor.

It’s too late to do anything. Much like the boy, their encampment is already a ruin. In minutes, flames start to flicker from more than their fires, and then the chaos starts in earnest. Men running between tents, yells and screams, and the occasional black shape darting back and forth against the flames. It’s like watching some silent play at one of the theater houses in the capitol, but the only music is the fight and then something else: a roar like a thunder.

Against the flames, shadows start moving toward him, at pace.

Horses, he realizes. Their horses—all of them, and in the lead, one with a rider on its back. Shiro stands to watch and realizes belatedly that they really are moving toward him— _right_ toward him, toward his hummock of rock. It’s too late to duck back down.

The rider doesn’t care, doesn’t even pause, but he does see Shiro. And Shiro sees him.

Only one person in this war looks like that. Only one leads night raids. Only one attacks without armor. The prince.

For a moment, the world stops. The yells from down below go quiet as the rider passes. He sees Shiro at the same moment Shiro sees him. A red scarf is wrapped around the bottom half of his face, but it’s not enough to hide what he is. Fire lights the high bones of his thin cheeks, staining his dark hair in shades of gold, flickering in his eyes. They widen in surprise, but it’s less than a second all told. The horse goes whipping past, and then the rest follow in a stampede that last for minutes, dragging tack in their wake, leaving only dust.

Dust and fire.

The Galra raiders are gone as fast as they came. It’s pure luck they attacked from the other side; no one blames Shiro for not sounding the alarm. The casualties are low by usual standards. Only three dead, the guard Shiro carried back into camp included, but then they’re stuck in the desert at the height of summer without supplies or a fast way out.

It takes almost three weeks for them to crawl their way out. More soldiers die on the way. Scouts disappear. Shiro upgrades himself to whatever job will keep him in camp and low to the ground. Anyone can set up a tent, but not many have the education to pore over maps, calculate distances, chart courses. That, he can do.

When they finally get out of the desert, through the scrub, and into the mountains that mark the border, Shiro has gained a rank and learned one hard lesson: never take the fight to the desert.

Shiro never forgets it. And he never forgets that face.

 

* * *

 

 2. 

The moments after a battle are the worst.

Shiro dug his old sergeant out of the mud a week back and got his position as a consolation prize. Now, here he is, waking exactly where he found the sergeant—half buried in churned up ground, left for dead by anyone living who cared because he looked dead. He feels dead. Even his hair has started to go white at the front from the stress. There are no mirrors, but some of it is long enough to fall in his eyes now and it’s not the chocolate brown he was proud of in training.

He plasters it back with mud and sets about freeing his feet and then trying to figure out if the battle was a victory and who for.

It’s impossible to tell. Everything looks the same in the mud. Purple, white, black—it all becomes brown in the end. Shiro toes a body over and sees the tell-tale gold on the shoulders of the woman’s uniform. Fewer stripes than Shiro, but no one is keeping track. There’s no burying her. No burying any of them. The girl’s eyes are still open, watching him distantly as he searches for a sword around her.

He lost his somewhere in the mud. Or it was taken, the way he was going to take hers, but swords aren’t the kind of thing that gets left behind. There are never enough weapons. Never enough living to bury the dead. Never enough time.

“Sorry,” Shiro says to the body when he’s done and feeling ashamed of the wasted effort and the mess on his hands. He would close her eyes if he thought they would stay shut. Before he goes, he pulls off the scarf from around his own neck and lays it over her face.

He searches for a sword for the better part of an hour, meandering his way around to make heads or tails of it all. The smoke is too thick in every direction to tell where a camp might be, or to tell if it’s one he wants to get to. His best chance is to run into a patrol—and one wearing his colors.

Luck isn’t so kind. Not by half.

The figure on horseback doesn’t see him at first, and that’s good, because Shiro can’t move.

It looks hideous, like a thing from a story meant to terrify children, and maybe the others were right after all. Maybe the prince is all they said he is. He looks it, now, coated in black. It must be disgusting. He’s plodding along between the corpses, seemingly aimless, until he pauses and dismounts. There’s a body below him in the dirt. Shiro realizes after a moment that it’s still moving, still struggling. The boy pulls out his blade. This is the first time Shiro has seen one transform first hand. No fireworks, no flames, no rising of shadows—no more than a flash, almost like it's caught the sunlight, and then it’s more than it was. The prince kneels and says something to the body in the dirt and then brings the blade forward, slides it into the man’s chest.

With his free hand, he closes the man’s eyes. It’s a mercy killing, Shiro realizes as the boy remounts and carries on. He repeats the ritual twice more as Shiro watches, ducked behind the ruined landscape, following almost by accident. Without a sword, he doesn’t have a chance in hell of taking on the prince, but he doesn’t want to try. This isn’t the boy from their stories. It’s as if he’s looking for something. As if he doesn't expect to find it.

Now at least the name makes sense. The Red Paladin. It’s not mud on him and the thought makes Shiro’s skin crawl in sympathy.

After the third body, the boy pauses there, leans his head against the flank of the horse that looks as weary and war-torn as he does. His mouth is moving, saying something too soft not to be carried away by the breeze that's starting to clear some of the stench.

Shiro moves closer, trying to make out his voice. He's never heard it. Probably no one does that lives long.

The prince remounts and then wheels the horse around in a burst of speed that takes Shiro by surprise. Shiro tries to scramble back to a hiding place but slips in the mud and even without the surprised grunt, the sound of him sliding down the hill would be enough to alert anyone nearby to his presence.

It’s his luck he slides in the horse’s direction.

It shies and rears; Shiro flips around on his back to at least face what’s coming at him, dragging the mud off his face and blinking it out of his eyes.

Up close, the prince is more striking in worse ways. He fights in close and tight and tends to go for the lethal and swift, with an aura about him of someone who would use his teeth on an enemy throat if he lost his sword. Shiro won’t have the privilege of finding out. He could as easily trample Shiro as bring that sword down.

The blade in his hand already. _I’m dead,_ Shiro realizes. It almost startles a laugh out of him. Of course, this is it, of all ways—walking and sliding into this after surviving a battle that was such a horror he can barely remember it.

The prince doesn’t move. The wind drags some of the hair out of his eyes. Strands that aren’t coated in grime look delicate, almost soft. Shiro watches his eyes shift to the parts of Shiro’s uniform that are still white, and then to the gold bars on his shoulder.

He’ll know Shiro’s rank. Maybe a line soldier wouldn’t be worth the time and effort of a kill, but a commander.

Instead, the prince blinks at him and then raises his blade. He points behind Shiro. “Your camp. It’s that way. They repositioned in the night.”

It’s the voice of a boy, though it’s rough. Shiro is half frozen in surprise, half in exhaustion, body still waiting for the blow.

At his silence, the boy continues: “There are no patrols out. It’s safe.”

It’s safe. He leaves it at that, easy as that, and then turns the horse around with a click of his tongue and starts to plod away.

“Wait—” Shiro hears himself say, starting to stand. “Who—who won?”

He turns back, and Shiro feels as if he’s been slapped. The look on his face is pure surprise, written in eyes that are the most perfect blue. He’s a boy. The prince is a _boy_ , and he’s been killing them in droves. “No one,” he says after a moment, softer than before, and then he wheels around and kicks the horse into a canter.

Shiro sits back down in the mud and watches him go.

The battle was shit. He’s aching in places he didn’t think he could and lost and tired and the one crystal clear thing in this war so far has been the enemy. The stories are ridiculous, but convenient, too. Easier to imagine it’s all worth it. Easier to fight a demon than a boy.

Shiro digs the heels of his palms into his eyes and sees only blue eyes, black hair, and red dried to black over pale skin.

 

* * *

 

3. 

That moment haunts and haunts him. It’s on the tip of his tongue to mention it when he gets back to camp that night, but he never does. No one would be believe him if he tried. He lets it sit inside him instead and turns it over in his mind at night. A boy with a sword, mercy killing his way across a field.

It’s such a grim image. At first, he tries to make it alien, tries to make it cruel, but he can’t muster the old, casual disregard. Strange is the first he settles on. Strange, but not evil. Not inhuman.

They promote him again, and then once more. Promotion by death is fast, but Shiro earns his place, too. He does twice the work, fights twice as hard. The life of a general isn't easier; no one can afford to sit the fight out. Sometimes at night he remembers that day with the sun and mud the and sick smell of blood and death all around them, and that one man. The eyes are what haunt him. Young and clear and wide, and, most painfully, kind. His words to Shiro were an apology he realizes in time. Going around, body to body. Sowing death and mercy. It's hard to imagine him saying anything else.

He’s strange, and the way he fights is beautiful, but in the way of a spider weaving a web. Nothing should be able to move that way—and he doesn’t stop. Fear when he’s on the battlefield is so heady that Shiro can almost taste it, can smell it coming off the men around him. Shiro sees from afar twice more, but none of his men will test the guard around the Prince, and Shiro won’t ask them to. The only prize for making it past them is a quick death.

He has a fondness for fighting up close and going for the throat, where blood comes out like a cascade. Shiro watches him once for almost a full ten minutes, enraptured as he kills the men Shiro has worked for weeks to train.

This is a new feeling. In all his life, he can’t recall it. An ache, a longing, a rage—all at once.

Maybe he’s going crazy, fixated on the one thing in this war that can’t be explained. Now that Shiro is a general, the ramifications of the prince’s victories are less something distant to be marveled at and more a personal pain. This isn’t a fly biting at him but more the head of some vicious arrow embedded in his chest, moving closer to his heart every day.

The prince can’t win this war, but he can bleed them dry.

When they promoted him to general, his first act was a request. _I want to know everything about him,_ he’d asked.

The response had been underwhelming. He would have been better off asking the soldiers gathered around one of the camp’s fires. _We don’t know anything,_ they told him. _We think we know who his mother is, but his father, age, where he came from—_

_Why does that matter?_ the admiral had cut in. _He just needs to be killed. I cannot believe that your army can’t manage to kill one boy._

Shiro had bristled at the implication of incompetence, bristled because she didn’t know what it was like out there—didn’t know what _he’s_ like, and bristled too because her words bit in a way they shouldn’t have. Kill a boy. Kill him and end his rough voice and black hair and close those eyes forever. God, those eyes. If he lay awake in bed a hundred nights thinking of that moment, he wouldn’t be able to make it make sense. He should have killed him, he thinks at first, as if he could have. He should have tried, at least.

Now, at night in the warmth and safety of his camp and bed, he conjures conversations, words he might have used to end the war, to beg answers out of him, or maybe simple questions. _Where are you from? Do you want to be here?_

_How do you move like that?_

In his head, in reply, there’s only silence. He can’t decide what the boy-prince would reply with and he can’t recreate that voice beyond those simple words. _It’s safe._

He mourns that he’ll never get the chance again, but he does.

 

* * *

 

It’s not a year later, and this is it. This is the day he will regret for the rest of his life.

Another promotion, and he’s the general now. Not _a_ general, but the head. The top. Three victories in a row to give him that status, routes that leave the enemy bloodied and weak. Almost so weak that they’re brave enough to try what they haven’t in almost five years and make an inroads to the heart of Galra territory, to start rooting them out stronghold by stronghold, but no. Shiro axes that idea at its first voicing, and for once, everyone listens.

Intelligence on the Galra is spare and mostly useless beyond what scouts can catch a day or two in advance. The prince has been a torment lately. An animal backed into a corner is always more dangerous. Shiro would do anything to get him on the other side of a table for negotiations, but that would depend on the permission of his generals, which would never happen. It would depend on knowing where the prince is, which they don’t on any given day.

It would depend on sending soldiers with a truce flag and trusting they would come back in one piece, which Shiro doesn’t.

There’s only one life he’s willing to risk for the chance.

He follows his instincts, chasing rumors and shadows. Half-mumbled reports from young guards too new to the job to know what sometimes speaking about bad luck is the same as inviting it in. Shiro takes a skeleton crew with him to match the prince’s raiders and does his best to think like he wants to believe the prince thinks. For three weeks, they tramp through the wilds, picking stickers from their cloaks in the evenings, huddling for warmth around a single, pathetic fire. To have any fire at all is a risk, but that's the point. Be diminutive, be easy prey, draw him in. Act like they have something worth taking.

Of course, nothing with the prince is easy. Nothing goes as planned.

When he finally shows, it’s on a moonless night, much like the first. Shiro is expecting him, in the distant sense, in the way he’s been expecting him for years now—but it still takes him by surprise. He looks different. His face is still thin and pointed, but now he wears it with grace. Eyes brighter, more keen. Hair long enough to brush his shoulders, hanging loose and wild. Eyebrows thick and severe and expressive.

For an instant, Shiro's breath leaves him.

He has muscle now, too. The first hit rattles Shiro's teeth. The prince doesn’t waste time, not even after Shiro’s quiet, “Wait—” Speed was once his best advantage, but now the prince has the strength to back it and make himself more than lethal. From the first moment of the fight, Shiro is on his toes, blood thrilling.

In his mind, it would go like this: the prince sneaking into camp at night, falling into a trap, and Shiro’s soldiers waiting with bows drawn and ready. _No,_ Shiro would say with a raised hand, stilling them, drawing the prince’s gaze. They would end this, at last, with no greater loss of life.

This meeting feels more like chance. A quick scout up the canyon on his own, and of course this is what Shiro would find. This man, by chance, at last. He draws his blade first and Shiro can do nothing but meet it in kind. The prince's steps fall in time with his own heartbeat. Forward, forward, back, twist, beat, beat, beat. Shiro meets each blow with increasing urgency. The fight doesn't leave him room to breathe or make his own attack—this is pure defense, a struggle not to fall right there.

“You're the general,” the boy grates out between breaths, as if he's just understood something. “I've heard all about you.”

This is their third meeting. The first on an equal footing—literally. Maybe it's hard to recognize someone when you've only stared down at them from horseback. “We've met before,” Shiro says, if just to watch the prince's brow pinch in boyish confusion.

Even if he has grown, even if he's stronger and faster than he was, Shiro has inches on him in height. Not necessarily an advantage, but he does spare a moment to wonder how big the difference really is. If he'd have to lean down to speak in his ear, or how hard it would be to lift him—nonsense wonderings, built from some dream.

“You're good,” the prince continues in half-wonderment. _Good_. The word has a lilt to it. Good at this. Good at fighting. Good at winning. Not good in any other sense—not like a war-weary prince tending to the dying after a fight, willing even to send some rank-and-file foot soldier on his way. It's this that's given Shiro pause.

The prince is good. In every way, he's _good_.

Shiro wants to pick him apart. Wants to sit down with him across a good meal and wine, figure out what it takes to make a leader that seems born to the task, a fighter that can spin around the battlefield like one of the dust demons they learned to fear on the horizon in the desert, a man who still spares attention for the quiet mess that comes after a won fight. The prince spins around him in the same way.

“You’ve been following us. We don’t have anything you want.”  They break apart. The prince can only manage the words between breaths, so hard they sound painful.

Shiro shakes his head, wipes a hand over the back of his mouth. “You’ve been following _us_.”

“No.” The prince’s eyes narrow. “No, we haven’t. This was a trap.”

It was, and now realization dawns. This isn’t a chance meeting. And there’s a chance the camp will be a ruin when he gets back. Stupid, stupid.

Nothing with him is easy. Truly, nothing ever will be. He’s been playing with them for weeks. Anger rises in Shiro like a storm. He brings up his blade again and tries to feint, but the prince's eyes are too fast; he ducks under the blow and sends Shiro stumbling back again.

Around and around they go. Shiro's stamina starts to edge out his opponent's speed, as it has a hundred times before, but this is one man he can't underestimate. Instead of backing off, the prince turns ferocious. His blows come at double-speed. “Wait—” Shiro tries once and gets a blow that steals his breath for the asking.

The exchange becomes frenzied and wild, a perfect rhythm—until it isn't. Shiro falls on him, presses him into a jut of rock against the canyon wall to try and pin him there. For a moment, they’re pressed chest to chest and Shiro can feel his breath in the air between them, smell the tang of blood on it, but only a moment. The prince squirms out from under his grip and spins once more, as if it’s a game, and meets him blade for blade. If Shiro were wiser, he would stop, step back, take the moment, ask for the favor of his time, but the fight is too good.

He can’t stop, and so his ruin comes.

Another spin, a block, a parry, a strike, and there it is—at last, his stamina wins out. The prince’s movements are too slow. The sweat in his eyes blinds him.

Shiro only sees he isn't going to block at the last moment.

It's the longest moment if his life compared to that first, with the hot wind of the desert night stinging at his face, dust and fire on the horizon, and this face before him. The prince looks now like he did then: eyes wide, a bit more than a simple leader, and a bit less. Human, and terribly so.

Shiro tries to divert it, to pull it back, but momentum is momentum, and Shiro’s aim is never off the mark. Steel meets skin and parts it. He sees the prince flinch, and then sees the bloom of blood across his once-perfect face, feels the drag against the sword-point as it meets the resistance of flesh.

The prince screams.

It's a rough, bit-off sound that tears through Shiro's middle like the blade went through him instead. But no. The prince still has a grip on his sword, and Shiro's is hanging between them, dripping blood. The prince scrambles back, stumbles and almost falls over his own feet, but doesn't. All the spark is gone out of his eyes, even if the anger is still stuck fast. He presses a hand to his cheek, to his jaw, blood flowing between his fingers.

_It's safe._ Those words run through his mind once more. One phrase. A touchstone in this war, a connection, and one he's snapped now like a thread.

“I'm s—”

The boy's eyes widen as the apology tears from Shiro's lips, but he's not looking at Shiro—he's looking behind. Battle instinct honed by years of being on that edge are Shiro's only saving grace. He spins and brings his blade up in time to block the blow that's coming for him. The Galra soldier is bigger than his prince. Bigger, and slower. Fiercer, too. Angry, because the prince’s blood is on his sword. It wasn’t meant to be an ambush. It was meant to be a truce, a moment, a chance to end all of this. Ruined, now.

The fight the Galra soldier puts up is short and merciless. When Shiro pulls the blade out of the soldier’s chest and turns, the prince is gone.

 

* * *

 

The camp is as much in chaos as he feared. Five dead. The rest he drags back to the main force and tells no one what he did. He can barely admit it to himself, though he can think of nothing else.

Seven nights later, in the dark of his tent, with nothing but the easy sounds of the main camp beyond the canvas walls, he dreams of hot breath on his cheek and a body under his—the tangle of limbs and the shared heat of movement. A dream of a fight, he thinks, until it crests.

He wakes wet and riding the aftershocks. The one blessing is that the general is afforded a solo tent. When he wipes at his forehead, his hand comes away tacky with sweat. For minutes, he sits there in shock, trying to remember when he last had a dream like that. Not since he was a teenager, and it didn’t feel like this then—like some fulfilment of a dream more than a dream itself. He wipes his forehead again and then pushes thumb and forefinger against his eyes until stars spark against his eyelids.

It sticks with him after that.

If he lets down his guard, images slip past: dark hair, bright eyes, and now the firmness of a body under his hands, of muscle shifting under skin.

After that, the Galra divide the main army into three branches that harry supply lines, distract, and elude. The war becomes a hurry up and wait, a constant challenge, built of night raids and desperate ambushes, and sometimes out and out fights on open fields.

And through it all, he fights his own war at night. In dreams, he can see only that face and feel only that touch, hear only that one voice.

_It’s safe,_ it says to him, over and over. He wishes it was true.

 

* * *

 

4. 

The wound on his arm won't heal. They keep fussing, cutting away at it, pouring tinctures down his throat and pasting on salves. He can read between the lines—a wound like this on a line soldier would mean one thing and one thing only, but that's not what he is now, so they draw it out.

A wound on a king is another matter.

If he's scratched, the men and women that serve under him will see. It's bad for morale. If he's sore, if he limps, it’s bad for morale. If he coughs, it’s bad for morale. This isn’t something that can be glossed over or buffed out like the scratches in his armor.

But the scars, he thinks in the quiet, are what got him the crown. It's been so long since his people thought they needed a ruler, but this war has changed more than it hasn't and now to have one singular person holding up the world is appealing in so many ways.

Or maybe it’s to have one person to pin blame on. No one wants to admit they're losing.

It will be a win in the end, but only in the most technical sense. More Galra will be dead by percentages, more of their arid, scraped-from-rock existence torn down. What a prize, Shiro thinks as he shakes in anticipation at the sound of water. He's not supposed to wet the wound on his arm, but the near-ice is the only thing that eases the ache now—and it's less an ache than a constant agony.

The river he steals off to is far enough from the main force that he hopes he won’t run into anyone. Privacy is something you lose as king—one more reason he tried to refuse it—but that’s all past now. What’s done is done. When he ducks under the branches of the trees that line the top of the small ridge, he can see the river has overtopped its banks with an early-summer downpour; the entire forest below looks like it's covered in a thin coating of glass. He slides down the slope as best he can with one functioning arm and then takes his boots off and sets them over a tree branch nearby, and then sinks into the water, past caring if his white sleeping clothes get soaked.

It’s as cold as he dreamed. He hisses as pain spikes in his arm and then eases slowly into numbness. The gash was a lucky hit, courtesy of some lithe, black haired Galra soldier and the sweat in Shiro’s eyes.

After a long minute of digging his toes into the moss, he decides to take his shirt off, too.

They showed him the castle at the coronation, but he's only been there twice. It has a bath and a whole wing just for his use—as if he'll live that long. It's too lonely anyway, and too vast for one man to hold. Nothing in that palace could match the quiet of a forest at noon, or the particular pleasure of escaping camp for his own private moment.

As soon as he thinks it, the silence of the forest is broken by the splash of water.

Shiro looks up and is sure he’s fallen asleep and this is some misplaced dream. In no world, would that man be here—but if it is a dream, he owes his imagination a drink.

This version of the prince is clean and dressed down, water dripping off his bangs and sliding down his neck. They’re only the stream’s width apart—close enough to track the widening of his eyes and each drop’s progress.

“Shit,” the prince says delicately and then sprints.

In his dreams, the prince only ever says one thing, and it’s not that.

Two years now. Two years since Shiro scarred him and lost his chance at peace. Two years since he started waking in heat and desire. Two years since he told himself this chance would never come again.

Shiro chases him. The prince is still fast—always has been, his chief quality, the thing that made him more a nuisance than anything else—but Shiro is faster. His sword is with his boots, set against the tree; he grabs it and chases. A month back, the prince raided a supply line that camped for the night in the same pass Shiro once did. They were carrying a new munitions line that promised to be deadly. Shiro only approved it out of desperation; the constant nagging of his generals, the constant fighting. Anything to end it, he thought. Even a thing that seemed more witchcraft than war, built on a powder that could spark to fire with the strike of a flint. His hopes were low. If it was nothing more than a final boon, it was enough.

They never found out. The prince snuck in at night with a group of twenty men or less, lit fires, found the ammunition and powder stored in one of the tents and up it went. All of it. Not just the camp, but the forest. It was a fight for the soldier’s lives to escape it, in the worst way imaginable. Not many made it. Forty men and women lost their lives in the end. Good soldiers, each of them, dead. Shiro went around after, and he recognized the telltale cut between their ribs. Mercy or silence, courtesy of the prince—both made his blood boil, made his heart ache in two horrid ways at once.

Tree limbs whip past them as Shiro tries to keep up. “Stop—” Shiro tries to shout past the breath gusting through his lips.  He can’t imagine how ridiculous they look. All he can catch is the brief glimpse of pale skin and black hair between leaves and branches as he splashes and runs and tries not to let the water drag his steps, though it does. It’s a slow-motion chase, Shiro grabbing at shadows and the prince trying to dodge around branches.

As before, his first mistake is to think he’s the one hunting.

The prince disappears in a moment and Shiro is left standing between the trees, ankle-deep in water, until a flash of motion strikes off to his left, and he can barely brace himself before he’s tackled.

“ _Stop,_ ” the prince replies, mocking. His knife comes down hard, but it’s not yet a sword; Shiro blocks with his sheathed blade.

The scar across the boy’s cheek is striking, twisted and red, as if it didn’t heal right. Maybe it wasn’t treated at all, or maybe it was too deep to bother trying.

Shiro loathes the thing pounding through his chest. He loathes it because it’s his fault. He’s the one that ruined that face. He could have held back, refused to fight, begged for a truce. Or: he could have made it kill, but he didn’t. The worst of two worlds is what he chose. Which he might have wanted more, he can’t say now. This war has taken his arm and his sense at the same time.

With a heave, Shiro tries to rise. The prince’s eyes have strayed to his Shiro’s neck and then to his chest and arm. He doesn’t see it coming. Shiro uses his momentum to carry through and push the smaller body against the nearest tree. He tries to kick at Shiro’s stomach, hard, and Shiro almost loses his grip.

His right arm screams as he uses it to flip the prince and pin his wrist against the small of his back. With force, he leans his entire body inward, holding him against the tree out of necessity, trying to buy a moment to catch his breath. All the while, the prince struggles and kicks. It’s like trying to hold a live fish, but Shiro manages it.

After what might be minutes but is probably only seconds, the boy relaxes imperceptibly, exhausted. It’s probably a feint. Shiro doesn’t loosen his grip, but he eases some of his full weight off.

The sound of their breaths fills the quiet, along with the dripping of dew off the branches around them.

It’s all an act. Even the sweet gasp of the prince’s breathing. If Shiro loosens his grip even a millimeter more, the prince will be gone, but now that he’s got him, all the anger, all the regret he’s nursed for months since that night is gone in the heat of his body against Shiro’s. He’s lost weight or gained height. His spine sticks out at the back of his neck, right under the edge of his hair, where the wide collar of his shirt hides nothing.

Shiro wants to lean forward. He wants to see if that hair is soft, if his skin is, and what he smells like when he’s clean and free of a battle’s worth of blood and dirt. He’s human. That’s for certain. Beautifully human.

Of course, if he tries, he’ll get a broken nose for his stupidity.

The coolness of the forest around them makes the body before him radiate an outsized amount of heat. “What are you doing here?” Shiro asks, more in wonder than interrogation.

The prince takes a breath and presses back against Shiro without breaking Shiro’s grip. “What are _you_ doing here?” he mocks again, like some trained crow that can only repeat words, but then his voice changes. “You're king now.” The words almost make him loosen his grip, the way they cut. The prince twists his head to the side. “Congratulations,” he adds, still with that edge.

As if this is something Shiro wanted. As if the prince knows what a torment he’s been, how hard he’s made it to do anything but lose and strive and struggle in this war. Shiro is so surprised, so _mad,_ that the answer is on the tip of his tongue before he can stop it. “It wasn’t my choice,” he says with the same bite, and pushes harder into him, breathing the words against his ear. “Was it yours?”

He means: _You’ve made it this way, for both of us._ He means: _I hate this. I never wanted it. I wish you knew._

But he finds suddenly, the only meaning that comes through is this: _You are the only person in this war that knows what it’s like to lead an army into a battle that can’t be won._

He wants to sit with the prince, once more. Talk to him. Tell him about his pains, whine about his arm, commiserate with the one man on earth who might understand.

The prince pushes back against him, until he's a hard line of heat against Shiro's front. His hair brushes Shiro’s cheek, and then his mouth for a moment as he opens his mouth to say more. This is his chance. Ask something, he tells himself. Ask anything. He leans into that firm body, and now if the prince wanted to break Shiro’s grip, it would be a farce. He isn’t trying to restrain—only hold. Only keep. Only beg for a moment of his time.

This is going to ruin him. Fodder for his dreams for the rest of his life, no matter how this war wins out.

He’s as soft as Shiro dreamed; as soft as he feared. He smells of sweat and heat and everything that grows in the forest. He smells real. Shiro breathes and breathes and on the third intake, he opens his mouth, unsure what he’s going to do with it or say or beg, but the crack of branches behind him stops him from speaking. Shiro gives up his hold and spins.

“Sir—“

It’s one of his own guards, decked in white. Someone sent to find him. The man’s eyes are wide beyond belief.

When Shiro turns back, the prince is gone.

 

* * *

 

5.

“They won't last,” Iverson says. A laugh colors his voice, but it isn't joyful.

Shiro swirls the wine in his glass and resists the urge to sigh. _Can't we just end this_? he wants to ask, but it's a non-starter. No one wants to give up a war that might have been won. The victory is symbolic. Kill the prince, break their will, take out what's left or let them retreat. Starve them out. Or if they don't, if they won't, kill them sooner. The Galra lord over a land only they know how to rule. No conquering army will find any riches there, but there's nothing like a war to keep the peace at home.

Still, Shiro thinks with a trained bitterness, all things must end.

 

* * *

 

He does try suing for peace once more.

They send a messenger across the mountains. Three, actually, though only one makes it back. It's a months-long fight to get his generals to agree to it. The messenger comes back tied to his horse, his head in a bag lashed to his hip. It doesn't really seem like the prince's style, but maybe he's beholden to the same hierarchy of loyalties Shiro is.

They don't try sending another.

 

* * *

 

 

Shiro pours himself into an ending. He knows the Galra well enough a decade in to come up with a strategy. He corrals their three armies over the course of months—sacrifices men, sacrifices land, sacrifices good will, until they’re backed up against the mountains. Most escape, but a small force stays to stall Shiro’s force. A sacrifice. When news comes that the prince is among them, Shiro’s heart stills in his chest. One more fight and it’s done.

That last battle is the worst. At the entrance to the canyon pass is a field of broken rock, a low angle slope of scree that hurts to walk on no matter how fine your boots are. Shiro’s are very fine. By midday, it doesn’t matter. His feet ache, sticky with mud and blood and bits of rock that cake to his soles, and the sun beats down between the gusting clouds. The bodies of the Galra and his own men lie all around him.

He hates every moment of it. He doesn’t want to see this. He doesn’t want to see the prince beat, inch by inch, into surrender.

By the time Shiro reaches him, he’s exhausted, movements sluggish, eyes unfocused under the grime that coats his face. Shiro waves off the soldiers nearby and steps forward after a moment, giving the prince a chance to gather his breath. It’s not going to be a good fight.

When he falls, finally, Shiro falls with him. He’s too stunned to move for the longest moment, because this is the chance he dreamed of having again a hundred nights and more. Every man and woman watching him wants one thing out of this. He can already see the victorious smile of his commanders in his mind’s eye, superimposed over the face that’s wincing and struggling in the mud. The motions should be pathetic, they _are_ pathetic, but it’s also so very him that Shiro can only watch and marvel. He’ll never give up, Shiro realizes, and wants to laugh. Even now, the prince can’t stop. He never will.

Even if Shiro puts a sword through his chest, his ghost will haunt Shiro beyond any grave. In dreams, in battle, in every choice he makes, the prince will be there.

Best he be alive for it, then.

With the weight of a hundred eyes on him, Shiro brings the sword down beside his head and offers him the only hand he has. “I’m not going to kill you. I don’t want to kill you. Please.”

The prince takes it after long beat and Shiro heaves him up, gathers him close, and closes his ears to the gasps around them, the first sounds of shock and discontent that will ring around him for days and weeks to come. The body against his is so small, the heart beneath his hand beating like a bird’s wings. Shiro feels as if he’s holding a thing made of pure lightning in his hands, electricity that could strike at any moment. There’s a blade in the prince’s hand still. He could use it. Shiro is half-tensed for the blow, waiting for it, sure the knife is already in him and the shock hasn’t set in.

It doesn’t matter, he realizes in that moment. The prince already has him in every way that counts.

 

* * *

 

It's been a year now. A year from that day, months since Keith bled for him, left, came back. Months since this easy comfort settled into their lives.

The quiet sounds of Keith shifting in bed behind him might once have been an annoyance, but now it's calming. The sweet reminder that the war gave him this one good thing. Keith moves again, closer and Shiro twitches as a cold foot is pressed between his calves. Yes, he thinks to himself as a second foot joins the other, marriage is a blessing.

“Keith,” he groans.

His movements freeze. “You're warm. It's not my fault this stupid place is made out of ice.”

Shiro rolls to face him. “You could just wear socks.”

In the dark, he can only make out the edges of the face on the pillow next to his. The fire is gone down, but there's moonlight coming in the window, enough to illuminate his hair and nothing else.

Keith snorts softly. “I am not wearing socks in bed.”

He doesn't wear much besides. He’s always cold, always eats like it’s his last meal, loses his guards on purpose and then gets lost in the strangest places. He has a wit dry as the desert he came from, a short temper for some things, but infinite patience for others.

Shiro reaches out and tugs at his bangs. “Your hair is getting long.”

“It is… Should I cut it?”

“No.” Shiro slides his hand around, tugs at the back of it lightly, but hard enough that Keith’s eyes close on a little intake of air. “I like it.”

A year in, and all these pieces of him that would have been lost forever. A year in, and still on solid ground. They’ve had a couple of fights. Keith’s flagrant disregard for any chain of command barring Shiro’s authority is endearing at first blush—less so when he’s willing to walk out of a meeting at the first sign of disrespect, but he’s getting better.

Keith opens his eyes again and then takes a deep breath, on purpose this time. “Can I ask you about—something.” The words have the particular roughness he gets when he’s not sure he isn’t going to be refused, as if Shiro would refuse him anything at this point. Maybe he knows. Maybe it’s why he doesn’t ask for much.

“No. I already told you we can’t fire Sanda.”

A cold foot kicks at his shin without real force and Keith snorts. “Funny. That’s not it. You…” He gathers himself and looks Shiro dead on, right in the eye. “You said you loved me. You said you loved me—from the start.”

Shiro glides his thumb over Keith’s cheek, and then down, across his jaw and the scar he left there and still regrets.

“I did,” Shiro murmurs. “The entire time.” _Even the night I gave you that scar,_ he thinks, and then starts. “Do you remember the first incursion? Eight years ago, I think. You were sixteen, I thought. I was a guard. A bad one.”

Keith’s eyes widen.

“You rode right past me...”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [[fic on twitter](https://twitter.com/arahir/status/1112859911925329920)] [[fic on tumblr](http://arahir.tumblr.com/post/183878149745/your-sharp-and-glorious-thorn-shiro-pov-epilogue)]
> 
> and then shiro tells him everything but not how he had xxx dreams about keith because he’s still too embarrassed to admit to it. the end until i inevitably write more for this au which i’m weak and a baby for! thank you always for reading, supporting me, being kind to each other, and everything else!!


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